Cloudera has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Asia/Pacific Sovereign AI Platform 2026 Vendor Assessment, recognising its approach to deploying AI workloads across private, hybrid, edge and air-gapped environments while maintaining data governance and sovereignty.
The recognition comes as enterprises across Asia Pacific face growing requirements around data residency, privacy and compliance while scaling generative and agentic AI. According to research cited by Cloudera, nearly 92% of Asia Pacific enterprises have delayed or cancelled AI projects because of data governance and compliance challenges, while 63% have moved AI workloads back to private cloud or on-premises environments to regain control.
Cloudera’s platform combines data-in-motion processing, an open data lakehouse, enterprise AI tooling and a unified data fabric, with security and governance capabilities across the data estate.
The platform uses Apache Ranger for access control, Apache Atlas for lineage and Cloudera Data Lineage for automated metadata collection. Cloudera said these capabilities provide trace-level visibility from source data through to deployed models, supporting audit and compliance requirements.
The company also said its approach allows organisations to bring compute to governed data rather than moving sensitive information across infrastructure boundaries. Models can be developed in one environment and deployed to another, including air-gapped data centres and edge devices such as Jetson boards, without requiring code to be rewritten.
Focus on sovereign AI
Cloudera’s open architecture is designed to support AI and data workloads across different infrastructure environments without requiring customers to commit to a single hardware or infrastructure vendor.
The company contributes to more than 50 Apache open-source projects and has nearly 2,000 active partner accounts, with a direct presence across nine Asia Pacific countries. Its recently announced Cloudera Anywhere Cloud is also designed to run its sovereign AI stack within a customer’s own cloud account.
Deepika Giri, VP, Asia/Pacific AI Platforms and Advisory, IDC, said regulated organisations require both auditability and flexibility as they scale AI across private, hybrid and edge environments.
“Platforms that deliver robust auditability alongside deployment flexibility across private, hybrid, and edge environments give regulated enterprises the control required to scale AI with confidence,” Giri said.
Sergio Gago, chief technology officer, Cloudera, said the recognition reinforces the company’s focus on enabling enterprises to retain control over where their data resides while deploying AI across different environments.
“Enterprise AI is only as valuable as the data behind it, and for the world’s most regulated organisations, that data must remain under strict sovereign control,” Gago said.
Remus Lim, senior vice president, Asia Pacific and Japan, Cloudera, said enterprises in the region were increasingly focused on balancing AI-driven business outcomes with sovereign governance requirements.
The IDC MarketScape assessment evaluates technology and service providers using qualitative and quantitative criteria covering product and service capabilities, strategies and current and future market success factors. The methodology presents vendors’ positions within a competitive landscape and provides technology buyers with an assessment of vendor strengths and weaknesses.