PARIS, July 01, 2022 -- Thales announced today the creation of S3NS, a French company designed to offer public and private organizations in France the power of Google Cloud, fully compliant with France's “Trusted Cloud” label, in partnership with Google Cloud.

The new company, majority owned and controlled by Thales, is under French law and follows the October 2021 partnership announcement between Thales and Google Cloud to jointly develop a locally-compliant Trusted Cloud offering. Thales and Google Cloud are committed to helping companies and public institutions to innovate and accelerate their digital transformation in ways that afford autonomy, compliant sovereignty, and the greatest possible benefits for their customers and users.

Meeting the French “Trusted Cloud”

S3NS will offer from the second half of 2024 its “trusted cloud” offering that will ultimately combine full performance, services and applications of Google Cloud technology while allowing protection against extraterritorial foreign laws and in compliance with the requirements of the “Trusted Cloud” label of France’s Information Systems Security Agency (ANSSI) in the frame of the French State strategy. S3NS will directly operate three data centers to ensure data and workload localisation in France. Both data center availability and engineering assistance will be available this year already and the recruitment of engineers who will operate the “Trusted Cloud” will begin.

A first milestone with an offering already available

S3NS' first offering is “Local control with S3NS”, which will offer Google Cloud customers in France continued high public cloud performance, with added capabilities to localize clients’ data in France or in Europe, as needed or preferred. Customers will be able to restrict data access for administrative service and technical support solely to European Union locations. Cryptographic control of data access can be achieved with external encryption key management from S3NS. This first offering brings compliance with additional automation to simplify operations, along with additional auditability and transparency to increase customer confidence in cloud operations.

Committing partners already

To best support customers in this transition to the “Trusted Cloud”, S3NS is finalizing specific partnership agreements with various players in France's growing digital ecosystem. Partners will be able to support S3NS customers in their cloud and digital sovereignty strategy, as they migrate and operate their workloads and applications securely, with the help of S3NS’ and other managed services.

“The S3NS offering is the best of both worlds: the agility and wide range of services of a cloud hyperscaler combined with the security and data protection of a cybersecurity leader. This step marks the beginning of a technological and industrial adventure which will engage all the French economic players attached to a trusted solution. As a leader in critical information systems, Thales is once again demonstrating its ability to be a driving force in disruptive technologies.” Marc Darmon, Executive Vice President, Secure Communications and Information Systems at Thales.

“The creation of S3NS, progress on the definition of our Trusted Cloud offering and the availability of our ‘Local controls with S3NS’ is the result of many months of collaboration between Thales and the Google Cloud teams. This is a first step and a first milestone this year, before our future solution in compliance with the French ‘Trusted Cloud’ criteria, which we are working on in parallel. Our objective is to be the first to make such an offering available for certification and based on hyperscale cloud technology. ‘Local Controls with S3NS’ enables our customers to start their journey to the trusted cloud now.” Cyprien Falque, Managing director of S3NS.

“We are very proud to support our partner Thales and its subsidiary S3NS and its first offering in the French market. This collaboration between our teams reflects on the one hand an understanding of the expectations related to digital sovereignty, and on the other hand a real technological trajectory. We confirm the commitments made together in 2021 and will continue to support digital transformation with offers that combine security and sovereignty, without compromising on performance.” Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud.