Orange Business wins second SecNumCloud qualification

Orange Business has received a new SecNumCloud qualification from France's national cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, for its Cloud Avenue SecNum Dynamic service.

The award gives Orange Business a second qualified environment in its cloud portfolio as French rules tighten around hosting highly sensitive data in cloud systems used by the state, public operators and public-interest bodies.

ANSSI's SecNumCloud framework is regarded as France's highest security standard for cloud services. It assesses cybersecurity, data protection and transparency requirements for providers handling sensitive workloads.

The newly qualified Cloud Avenue SecNum Dynamic service is aimed at organisations that need greater isolation and resilience for critical applications. The environment uses dedicated resources for each customer, with physical separation from other clients and a high-availability architecture across two data centres in Val-de-Reuil and Chartres.

The service also includes GPU servers for artificial intelligence workloads, including model training and inference. That places the qualification in a market where demand for secure cloud infrastructure is rising alongside the use of AI in regulated and sensitive settings.

Two environments

Orange Business had already secured a SecNumCloud qualification for another environment in its Cloud Avenue range in 2025. With the latest award, it now offers two qualified options designed for different sovereignty and resilience requirements.

Its existing Cloud Avenue SecNum environment offers shared or dedicated single-site set-ups for projects with sovereignty needs. Customers can combine that environment's SecNumCloud qualification with ISO 27001 certification and France's HDS certification for health data hosting.

The addition of Cloud Avenue SecNum Dynamic broadens the range for customers seeking infrastructure that is both dedicated and distributed across more than one site. The distinction matters for organisations deciding how far they need to separate workloads, protect sensitive information and maintain continuity if systems fail.

In August, a ministerial order approved version 3.2 of the SecNumCloud framework and clarified the conditions for certain cloud services used to process particularly sensitive information. That has increased attention on which cloud services meet the standard for public-sector and closely regulated use cases in France.

Cloud sovereignty

The latest qualification comes as European businesses and public bodies face growing pressure to keep sensitive data under tighter jurisdictional and operational control. Cloud sovereignty has become a central issue in procurement decisions, especially where data sensitivity, critical national functions or AI training data are involved.

For providers, that has created an incentive to develop more segmented infrastructure offers rather than a single cloud model for all workloads. Orange Business is positioning its portfolio around that distinction, with one qualified service for sovereignty-sensitive projects and another for workloads that also require stronger resilience and dedicated architecture.

The new environment is intended for customers that need the highest security level as well as dedicated computing resources. The inclusion of GPU servers also suggests Orange Business is seeking to capture demand from organisations that want to run AI applications within a framework aligned with French security standards.

That is likely to be relevant for sectors such as government, healthcare, defence-related industries and operators of critical infrastructure, where requirements for data handling and service continuity are stricter than in the wider commercial market.

Orange Group has also linked secure infrastructure investment to broader digital sovereignty efforts in France and Europe. It has referred to plans for a joint venture with Morrison to develop data centres, aiming to expand hosting capacity for digital and AI use cases.

Aliette Mousnier-Lompré, Chief Executive Officer of Orange Business, described the new qualification as expanding customer choice for sensitive workloads.

"Trust is earned, not claimed. This second SecNumCloud qualification gives organizations more choice for their most critical projects, from protecting sensitive data and ensuring business continuity to deploying trusted AI. They can select the cloud environment that matches their needs for resilience, dedicated infrastructure and computing power, backed by the security and expertise of Orange Business," said Aliette Mousnier-Lompré, Chief Executive Officer of Orange Business.