AWS announced it will launch the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, a new, independent cloud for Europe designed to help public sector customers and those in highly regulated industries meet the most stringent regulatory data residency and operational requirements.
Located and operated within Europe, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be physically and logically separate from existing AWS Regions, with the same security, availability, and performance of existing AWS Regions, giving customers additional choice to meet their data residency, operational autonomy, and resiliency needs.
The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will launch with its first AWS Region in Germany and will be available to all European customers.
As with existing AWS Regions, customers will have the control and assurance that AWS will not access or use customer data for any purpose without their agreement, as well as access to the strongest sovereignty controls among leading cloud providers. Only EU-resident AWS employees who are located in the EU will have control of the operations and support for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
For customers with enhanced data residency needs, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will allow customers to keep all metadata they create (such as the roles, permissions, resource labels, and configurations they use to run AWS) in the EU, and will feature its own billing and usage metering systems.
“The AWS European Sovereign Cloud reinforces our commitment to offering AWS customers the most advanced set of sovereignty controls, privacy safeguards, and security features available in the cloud,” said Max Peterson, VP of Sovereign Cloud at AWS. “For more than a decade, we’ve worked with governments and regulatory bodies across Europe to understand and meet evolving needs in cybersecurity, data privacy and localization, and more recently, digital sovereignty. With this new offering, customers and Partners across Europe will have more choice to achieve the operational independence they require, without compromising on the broadest and deepest cloud services that millions of customers already know and use today.”
“The development of a European AWS cloud will make it much easier for many public sector organizations and companies with high data security and data protection requirements to use AWS services,” said Claudia Plattner, president, German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).
“We are aware of the innovative power of modern cloud services, and we want to help make them securely available for Germany and Europe. The C5 (Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalogue), which was developed by the BSI, has significantly shaped cybersecurity cloud standards, and AWS was, in fact, the first cloud service provider to receive the BSI’s C5 testate. In this respect, we are very pleased to constructively accompany the local development of an AWS cloud, which will also contribute to European sovereignty, in terms of security,” added Plattner.
The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be sovereign-by-design and will be built on more than a decade of AWS’s experience operating multiple independent clouds for the most critical and restricted workloads.
Customers who need more options to address stringent isolation and in-country data residency needs will be able to leverage existing offerings like AWS Outposts or AWS Dedicated Local Zones to deploy AWS European Sovereign Cloud infrastructure in locations they select.
AWS Outposts are fully managed solutions that deliver AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location for a consistent hybrid experience.They are designed for workloads that need to remain on-premises due to latency, data processing, and data residency requirements, where customers want those workloads to run seamlessly with their other workloads in AWS.
AWS Dedicated Local Zones are a type of infrastructure built for exclusive use by a customer or community and placed in a customer-specified location. They are designed to reduce the operational overhead of managing on-premises infrastructure at scale, and can be configured to meet a customer’s specific regulatory requirements.
AWS European Sovereign Cloud customers will benefit from the same low latency and high availability they expect from existing AWS Regions, and from access to the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud to drive innovation.
The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will offer multiple Availability Zones, infrastructure that is placed in separate and distinct geographic locations, with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers’ business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones.
Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency networks.
AWS offers the largest and most comprehensive cloud infrastructure globally, with 102 Availability Zones across 32 geographic regions, and has plans to launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Canada, Germany, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand.
AWS infrastructure in Europe currently includes eight AWS Regions in Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, Stockholm, Spain, and Zurich and more than 120 Content Distribution Network (CDN) points of presence in more than 25 cities across 19 European Member States.
Some of the largest AWS development teams are located in Europe, with key centers in Dublin, Dresden, and Berlin. Today, Amazon is creating thousands of high-quality jobs and investing billions of euros in European economies. Across the EU, Amazon has created more than 100,000 permanent jobs, and many major components of AWS, including the AWS Nitro System and Amazon CloudWatch, are built in the EU.
AWS European Sovereign Cloud will drive economic development through investing in infrastructure, jobs, and skills in communities and countries across Europe. As part of a continued commitment to contribute to the development of digital skills, AWS will hire and develop additional local personnel to operate and support the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
Organizations across the European Union are among the millions of active customers using AWS in more than 190 countries around the world. AWS provides the most comprehensive compliance controls, supporting 143 security standards and compliance certifications, to help customers satisfy regulatory requirements around the globe.
To meet additional data residency, operational autonomy, and resiliency needs in Europe, AWS is collaborating closely with European regulators and national cybersecurity agencies to build the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Many regulators, customers, and AWS Partners across Europe welcome the new AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
“We welcome the commitment of AWS to expand its infrastructure with an independent European cloud. This will give businesses and public sector organizations more choice in meeting digital sovereignty requirements,” said Dr. Markus Richter, chief information officer of the German federal government. “Cloud services are essential for the digitization of the public administration. With the ‘German Administration Cloud Strategy’ and the ‘EVB-IT Cloud’ contract standard, the foundations for cloud use in the public administration have been established. I am very pleased to work together with AWS to practically and collaboratively implement sovereignty in line with our cloud strategy.”
“AWS’s announcement of an independent European cloud will provide organizations facing the most stringent regulations with more choice in their digital sovereignty strategy,” said Jarkko Levasma, Finland Government chief information officer at the Ministry of Finance. “In order to successfully provide human-centric and secure services to citizens and businesses, public sector agencies need to have cloud solutions that are compatible with data protection and other legislation.”