AWS is going to introduce their AWS European Sovereign Cloud, a brand-new, autonomous cloud for Europe that is intended to assist clients in the public sector and highly regulated sectors in meeting the strictest operational and legal requirements for data residency. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud, which is based in Europe and is operated there, will be physically and logically distinct from existing AWS Regions. AWS claims it will offer the same security, availability, and performance.
This would give European cloud customers more options to satisfy their needs for data residency, operational autonomy, and resilience. All European cloud services clients will be able to use the AWS European Sovereign Cloud when it launches in Germany, the first AWS Region.
Customers would enjoy the same level of control and certainty as they do with current AWS Regions, “knowing that AWS will never access or use their data without their consent.” They would also get access to “the most robust sovereignty controls available among top cloud providers.”
The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be operated and supported exclusively by AWS personnel who are based in the EU. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will have its own billing and use metering systems and will enable clients with additional data residency requirements to maintain all information (roles, permissions, resource labels, and settings) in the EU.
“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.”
AWS Cloud Regions
Building upon more than a decade of AWS’s expertise managing numerous separate clouds for the most important and limited workloads, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be sovereign-by-design. AWS European Sovereign Cloud infrastructure may be deployed in customer-selected regions by using current solutions such as AWS Dedicated Local Zones or Outposts, which provide additional alternatives for meeting strict isolation and in-country data residency requirements.
For a consistent hybrid experience, AWS Outposts are fully managed solutions that bring AWS services and infrastructure to almost any on-premises or edge location. They are designed for workloads where customers want them to function smoothly with other workloads they have in AWS but have to stay on-premises because of latency, data processing, or data residency restrictions. AWS Dedicated Local Zones are a kind of infrastructure situated in a client-specified area and designed exclusively for the purpose of a customer or community. They may be set up to satisfy the unique regulatory needs of a client and are intended to lessen the operational burden associated with operating on-premises infrastructure at scale.
Customers of AWS European Sovereign Cloud will get access to the most extensive and widely used cloud in the world, which will spur innovation, in addition to the low latency and high availability they already anticipate from AWS Regions. Multiple Availability Zones and infrastructure located in discrete geographic locations will be made available by the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. These locations will be far enough apart to drastically lower the chance of a single event affecting customers’ business continuity, but close enough to offer low latency for high availability applications that leverage multiple Availability Zones.
Each Availability Zone is linked by redundant, ultra-low latency networks and has its own power, cooling, and physical security systems.
With 102 Availability Zones spread over 32 geographic areas, AWS claims to provide the most extensive and biggest cloud architecture available worldwide. The company also aims to introduce 15 more Availability Zones and five additional AWS areas in Canada, Germany, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand.
Eight AWS Regions – found in Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, Stockholm, Spain, and Zurich – as well as over 120 Content Distribution Network (CDN) Points of Presence – found in more than 25 locations across 19 European Member States – comprise the present AWS architecture in Europe.
Europe is home to some of the biggest AWS development teams, with major hubs in Berlin, Dresden, and Dublin. More than 100,000 permanent jobs have been established by Amazon in the EU. AWS will recruit and train more local workers to manage and maintain the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
“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, Vice President 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.”
