France’s Thales partners with Google on secure cloud services

Defence company Thales and Google are partnering to offer state-vetted cloud computing services for the storage of some of France’s most sensitive data, the companies said on Wednesday.

The alliance between Thales, Europe’s largest defence electronics supplier, and the Alphabet unit fulfils a May government plan under which France acknowledged U.S. technological superiority in the field.

The French government said then that cloud computing services developed by Google and Microsoft could be used to store France’s most sensitive state and corporate data, provided the services were licensed to French companies.