The Optimal Path to Cloud Compliance and Observability Excellence

Bart, Gaetan: How do you reflect on the performance of
last year?

Bart Watteeuw: Our infrastructure division has experienced solid growth, consistently expanding year after year. And as we navigate today’s complexities of the global IT landscape, we remain committed to meeting the ever-evolving demands of our customers. To tackle these challenges head-on, we’ve strategically focused our investments on two critical fronts: refining our ‘compliant cloud’ offering and fortifying our end-to-end observability capabilities.

We set great store by what we call ‘the compliant cloud.’ Can you elaborate? What problem are we solving?

Gaetan Willems: Organizations today grapple with critical data concerns essential to their operations. They
need absolute clarity on where their data is stored, who has access, when and by whom changes are made.
Different data types demand varying confidentiality levels, from highly sensitive to public.

As regulations become more complex and vary by organization type, sector, and country, maintaining
compliance is increasingly challenging. That is why, at Cegeka, we developed our compliant cloud service
offering. We implemented a set of technologies and services that support customers in meeting their regulatory obligations. 

How does ‘compliant cloud’ tie in with the ‘sovereign
cloud’ buzzword?

Bart Watteeuw: The fact is, there is no clear and auditable definition or formula for cloud sovereignty. It’s generally seen as a cloud environment within a specific country or region to meet local regulations. There’s no official checklist, stamp of approval, or certification to confirm, “You now operate in a sovereign cloud.”

So it’s largely a grey-area concept that organizations interpret as they see fit. Our compliant cloud service offering cuts through this vagueness, targeting the heart of the problem: enabling compliance and auditability in the cloud and providing solid proof of it.

Can we dive under the technological hood for a moment? How do we accomplish this transparency?

Gaetan Willems: It’s all about transparency and adaptability to meet customer requirements across different ‘landing zones’: from the Cegeka private data centers to the public cloud We have developed a control framework of both process and product controls. This Multi Compliance Framework is based on international standards like ISO 9001, ISO 27001, and GDPR, includes over 140 controls covering regulations such as NIS2 and DORA, with more being added to meet future standards like the EU AI Act and EUCS scheme for cloud services.

When customers require cloud services compliant with specific regulations, we ensure that our services adhere to this control framework. Regular third-party audits and annual ISAE 3000 (SOC2) Type II assurance reports provide customers with evidence of compliance, which they can present to regulators.

"It’s all about transparency and meeting customer requirements across different cloud ‘landing zones’."

To use another trendy buzzword, is this compliance ‘observable’ through Horizon, our customer engagement platform?

Bart Watteeuw: Yes. We’re in the process of building multiple dashboards within Horizon, which essentially acts as a pane of glass on top of your IT landscape. These dashboards provide customers and regulators real-time visibility into their compliance and security posture by displaying the status of each control of our Multi Compliance Framework.

Now that you mentioned the big word: observability is something we provide beyond the infrastructure
level. With our December 2023 acquisition of Key-Performance, a Dynatrace partner, we ensure that our observability goes beyond standard metrics. Today, we’re equipped to offer a comprehensive ‘digital experience management’ approach, spanning monitoring from infrastructure management to application performance, ensuring a thorough end-to-end chain.

"Observability is something we provide beyond the infrastructure level."

In March this year, we launched KubePort. Why was that? 

Gaetan Willems: We believe in a multi-cloud environment. Customers should be able to swiftly develop & move applications and data between cloud platforms, to respect different regulations, guarantee cost efficiency or simply to leverage new features. KubePort makes this easier: it’s a cloud-agnostic native managed container freeing developers from everyday management tasks. It also ensures a secure environment for developers, satisfying CISOs, and guarantees business continuity through its portability features, providing peace of mind for management.

Bart Watteeuw: With KubePort developers no longer have to deal with infrastructure maintenance, setting up or managing a container platform, or cloud-native tooling. KubePort manages all these tasks for them. This reflects our vision on innovation: customer-led coinnovation that addresses a tangible business problem. KubePort is an ‘engineered platform’ reported by Gartner as a top strategic technology trend for 2024. 

"KubePort reflects our vision on innovation: customerled co-innovation that addresses a tangible business problem."

To conclude, how do you see the future?

Bart Watteeuw: From where I stand, our ‘compliant cloud’ service offering appears to be right on target, with significant potential. Additionally, our end-toend observability portfolio adequately meets a crucial market demand. With a robust end-to-end offering and a pragmatic take on innovation, I am confident that more customers will embrace our approach.

The combination of our global capabilities, localized expertise, and personalized service, all facilitated through our ‘In Close Cooperation’ work ethic, is pretty unique in the market.