OVHcloud clears France’s SecNumCloud bar with its SNC Cloud Platform
ANSSI has qualified the SNC Cloud Platform — OVHcloud’s third SecNumCloud offering — and the company plans to roll it out across European regions, starting with Italy, Germany and Poland.
France’s cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, has granted SecNumCloud qualification to OVHcloud’s SNC Cloud Platform. It is the company’s third qualified offering, joining Bare Metal Pod and VMware on OVHcloud.
What the label actually means
SecNumCloud is the French framework a cloud service has to satisfy before it can host sensitive state data or serve regulated sectors. It covers security controls and, just as importantly, who is legally able to reach the data — which is why it has become shorthand in Europe for a cloud that sits outside the reach of non-EU disclosure law. Recent French legislation tightened the requirements for public bodies and regulated industries, which is a large part of why providers are queuing up for it.
What is qualified
The newly qualified platform is a public cloud in the ordinary sense: pay-as-you-go billing, open APIs and open-source standards, rather than a separate walled-off product with its own tooling. That combination is the point — until now, “sovereign” and “consumable like normal cloud” tended to be different shelves.
Next stops
OVHcloud says it is rolling the SNC Cloud Platform out across its European public-cloud regions, with Italy, Germany and Poland first in line, each aligned to its own national framework rather than to the French one.
Founder and chairman Octave Klaba framed the move around European technological control: as AI drives demand for infrastructure that customers can trust, Europe needs qualified cloud that is available pay-as-you-go in every European region. (Paraphrased — we did not have his exact wording.)
Why we are running this one
DohoHub tracks prices, and a certification is not a price. But it belongs on the same page for a simple reason: it is one of the very few claims in hosting that somebody other than the vendor has checked. “99.99% uptime”, “enterprise-grade security” and “fastest servers” are marketing until proven otherwise. A named qualification from a named agency can be looked up — and, unlike a slogan, it can also be withdrawn.