Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today 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. To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/compliance/europe-digital-sovereignty/.
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, 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.”
“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.”