Germany's SAP, the second-biggest European technology group by market capitalisation, is launching a so-called sovereign cloud offering in France on Monday with S3ns (pronounced "sens"), the Thales–Google Cloud joint venture. SAP customers will be able to migrate their systems straight onto the S3ns platform, which received SecNumCloud certification from France's cyber-security agency ANSSI in December — a state-recognised "trusted cloud" label recommended by the French government for sensitive data.
Thales is the "customer zero" of the new offering, which will be commercially available by the end of the year. The French group sees it as a way to accelerate scaling in defence and cyber-security, where it still runs much of its IT in-house. For SAP, the goal is to push reluctant clients in regulated sectors onto the cloud. The group had already announced a partnership with Mistral in Berlin, and earlier this year teamed up with cloud Bleu (a joint venture between Orange, Capgemini and Microsoft).
The macro context is helpful. Thomas Saueressig, an SAP executive board member, explicitly cites the US Cloud Act — the extraterritorial law that lets US authorities demand customer data from any US-domiciled company — as the trigger for boardroom debates across Europe. He argues for a European "digital union", calling it economically absurd to maintain 27 separate national clouds. Source: Les Echos, 27 April 2026, Joséphine Boone.