Vietnam to develop domestic cloud so it can ditch risky overseas operators for government workloads

Vietnam has decided to develop its own cloud platform, so its government agencies can stop using foreign-owned services.

Prime Minister Le Minh Hung last week announced the plan in Decision 808/QD-TTg, which lists 20 strategic technologies Vietnam wants to develop to improve its technological self-reliance and give its government the tools to tackle national challenges.

Developing a national cloud computing platform is number 13 on the list.

Machine translation of Decision 808 yields the following goals for the project: “Ensuring national data sovereignty and cybersecurity for the digital government and key digital economic infrastructures; forming a centralized, secure, and reliable digital and data infrastructure to serve national digital transformation; gradually replacing foreign cloud services in state agencies, reducing the risk of data leaks and breaches of state secrets.”

The move is a sign that Vietnam’s government, like many others, fears entanglements with cloud providers that may struggle to ...