Thales announced a new collaboration with Google Cloud that will accelerate the ability of enterprises to safely migrate sensitive data between public cloud, hybrid and private IT infrastructures.

Together, the two companies will offer new capabilities that enable security teams to own and control their encryption keys while helping to fulfill heightened regulatory requirements amidst today’s highly-distributed workforce.

Building on a multi-year history of innovation around a variety of cloud security initiatives, Thales and Google Cloud will now empower customers to leverage the full potential of Google Cloud technology for sensitive workloads while gaining the external key management needed to control and secure data across hybrid cloud IT environments.

This collaboration marks a significant moment for organisations to finally seize full control of their data and encryption keys, especially as they pursue hybrid, multi-cloud strategies. Addressing both private and public cloud environments, Thales and Google Cloud will provide a turnkey solution that manages, brokers and stores encryption keys completely controlled by the customer, effectively enabling companies to move data assets to the cloud with confidence.

As uncovered in the Thales 2020 Data Threat Report-Global Edition, this is increasingly becoming more critical as greater than half of the world’s corporate data – of which 48% is sensitive – is stored in the cloud.

“New capabilities are critical to cloud migration and security, especially with such accelerated growth in this area,” said Sunil Potti, VP and GM of Google Cloud Security. “True to our mission, we’ve forged this deeper relationship with Thales to further protect our customer’s most sensitive information. Companies of all shapes and sizes are dealing with an extremely fluid and dynamic business environment where even the best lines of defence are constantly being battle tested. Together with Thales, we acknowledge the current set of circumstances and remain vigilant to provide customers with the most advanced solutions that address today’s cybersecurity needs as well as those that are emerging on the horizon.”

This collaboration greatly simplifies the security of moving to multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and edge-cloud environments – a journey more companies are making today to address the post-pandemic remote world. According to 451 Research, 62% of enterprises today are pursuing a hybrid IT strategy.

In addition, by working with Thales to handle application and data security in the cloud, Google Cloud customers can now maintain strong data sovereignty with encryption key visibility and lifecycle management. Customers also can address heightened regulatory requirements stemming from recent data and privacy regulations.

“Our collaboration with Google Cloud truly embodies the technology leadership needed to place the control of data directly into the hands of our customers,” said Sebastien Cano, SVP for Cloud Protection & Licensing at Thales. “Companies no longer need to put their sensitive data in untrusted environments and relinquish control of their coveted encryption keys. It has become abundantly clear that an evolution in data protection is taking place at a global level as security professionals work together to build a shared-responsibility security model between enterprise customers and providers. With this joint innovation effort, we’re supporting organisations as they move to the cloud with confidence.”

Overview

AT&T and Dell Technologies announced a collaboration to advance several open source projects focused on container orchestration and cloud-native infrastructure. The partnership centers on reducing friction in deploying and managing containerized workloads at scale — both on virtual machines and, increasingly, on bare-metal servers.

Key Open Source Projects in Scope

The collaboration targets three specific open source initiatives:

• AirShip — A management framework that combines OpenStack and Kubernetes to provide declarative, automated cloud provisioning and lifecycle management for containerized applications. AT&T originally launched the project, and both companies committed to accelerating its next major release.
• Metal3-io — A project focused on simplifying the provisioning of Kubernetes clusters directly on bare-metal hardware, removing the dependency on a hypervisor layer.
• OpenStack Ironic — The OpenStack service for bare-metal provisioning. Both companies committed contributions to improve the process of deploying OpenStack directly on physical servers.

Both companies also pledged contributions to the Kubernetes Cluster API, which provides a declarative API for cluster lifecycle management and is central to integrating Kubernetes with infrastructure providers such as OpenStack and bare-metal environments.

The Case for Bare-Metal Kubernetes

Eric Vallone, Director of Service Provider Solutions at Dell Technologies, stated that Dell is committed to enabling joint deployments of OpenStack and Kubernetes — whether on virtual machines or bare-metal servers. At the time of the announcement, virtual machine-based deployments were the dominant pattern for both platforms.

However, running Kubernetes directly on bare-metal offers meaningful advantages for certain workloads:

• Reduced overhead — Eliminating the hypervisor layer removes the performance and resource cost associated with running workloads inside virtual machines.
• Heterogeneous hardware support — Bare-metal Kubernetes clusters can more readily incorporate specialized processors such as GPUs and FPGAs, which are increasingly important for AI, ML, and network processing workloads.
• Tighter hardware utilization — Containerized workloads on bare metal can take full advantage of physical server resources without the abstraction tax of a guest OS and hypervisor.

Vallone acknowledged that this trajectory has implications for VMware — a Dell Technologies subsidiary — whose core business is built around hypervisor-based virtualization. Dell’s apparent bet is that VMware can evolve its portfolio to serve as a management layer bridging legacy virtualized environments and modern cloud-native, Kubernetes-based infrastructure.

AT&T’s 5G Containerization Strategy

AT&T’s motivation for the collaboration is rooted in its 5G network transformation. The carrier has publicly committed to replacing proprietary network infrastructure with open source software running on industry-standard hardware. Containers are central to that strategy: deploying 5G network functions as containerized workloads enables AT&T to build, update, and scale services with the agility that software-defined networking demands.

Beyond internal network functions, AT&T has signaled an intent to cultivate a third-party developer ecosystem — allowing external developers to build and deploy containerized applications on AT&T-managed platforms.

To support this infrastructure shift, AT&T will deploy a mix of Dell-branded and white-box servers in place of the proprietary infrastructure used for 3G and 4G network delivery, according to Vallone. This positions Dell to build expertise in carrier-grade, cloud-native deployments that it can then translate into commercial offerings for enterprise customers undergoing similar transformations.

Broader Industry Implications

The AT&T–Dell partnership reflects a wider industry trend: major carriers and infrastructure vendors are redirecting significant engineering resources toward cloud-native computing frameworks. As both AT&T and Dell face competitive pressure in their respective markets, their investment in open source container infrastructure is likely to accelerate adoption across the broader telco and enterprise IT sectors.

Projects like AirShip, Metal3-io, and the Kubernetes Cluster API benefit directly from this kind of large-scale industrial participation — contributions from organizations operating at carrier scale tend to surface integration requirements and edge cases that smaller contributors may not encounter.

Summary