On the occasion of presenting its half-year results, OVHcloud confirmed the creation of a Defense-dedicated activity, sketched out during an announcement at the InCyber Forum in Lille last week.
According to the CSP of Roubaix, this creation (often referred to as a “Defense vertical”) would respond to requests from several European ministries of the Armed Forces to assist them in their digital transformation.
“The stakes are strategic: command augmented by AI, drone orchestration, interoperability of communications between armies and with NATO; all of this with a strong expectation of technological independence from non-European suppliers,” he said.
All of this is accompanied by a strong demand for technological independence from non-European suppliers. In other words, sovereign states that explicitly seek an alternative to American hyperscalers.
Unprecedented Military Needs
To meet these needs, OVHcloud is building a dedicated offering based on its SecNumCloud products and is deploying a commercial organization across several European countries, recruiting professionals from the armed forces and the defense industry. The group also plans to support the upskilling of its teams to meet national requirements, including security clearances of the “secret defense” type.
OVHcloud relies on a large-scale cloud infrastructure, with multi-local architectures and 3-AZ regions ensuring business continuity and resilience, as well as on its OPCP hardware and software offering, which enables deploying cloud platforms directly within clients’ data centers, from the core of the infrastructures to the most sensitive sites at the edge.
Sovereignty as a Core Business
For years, OVHcloud has positioned strategic autonomy as its main differentiating argument against the American hyperscalers. “Defense now depends on cloud, data, and AI,” says Octave Klaba, its CEO, adding that Europe can no longer afford to rely on non-European technologies and must have powerful and sovereign alternatives.
Six months after returning to command, he presents the “Defense vertical” as one of the three structural initiatives of his mandate, alongside the refocusing of commercial efforts toward mid-market contracts and the launch of an AI Lab initiated by the acquisition of Dragon LLM.
