Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, 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.
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.
Max Peterson, vice president of Sovereign Cloud at AWS, said:
“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.”
“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.”
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.
Customers, AWS Partners, and regulators welcome 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.”
“The German and European economies are on course for digitization. The strong German ‘Mittelstand’ which are small and medium-sized enterprises, in particular need a sovereign digital infrastructure that meets the highest requirements in order to continue to be competitive in the global market,” said Stefan Schnorr, state secretary at the German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport. “For our digital independence, it is important that computing power is generated locally in Germany and that further investments are made in the digitalization of the local economy. We therefore welcome the announcement by AWS to locate the European cloud in Germany.”
“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.”
“Data sovereignty and residency are now at the forefront of European and national security debates. Therefore, AWS’s announcement of an independent European cloud is indeed the right decision at the right time that will ultimately also bolster transatlantic collaboration,” said Tomas Krejci, deputy director of the National Cyber and Information Security Agency (NÚKIB) in the Czech Republic. “We acknowledge that it will provide more heavily regulated organizations, such as those in the public sector with an eye on evolving regulation, more choice in their digital sovereignty strategy. A totally independent cloud, which delivers appropriate levels of cyber security together with the assurance of meeting stringent data protection requirements, will always benefit both public sector agencies and citizens at large.”
“We welcome the announcement by AWS to further enhance its current European infrastructure footprint with a new independent cloud. This will help public and private organizations navigating stringent regulatory requirements to accelerate their transition to the cloud while improving innovation and data security for the benefit of European citizens,” said Dan Cimpean, director of the National Cyber Security Directorate of Romania. “As Romania is championing the development of cybersecurity skills and competencies and hosting the European Cybersecurity Competence Center, we welcome this move by AWS also as a long-term investment in cloud and security skills in Europe.”
SAP SE is a market leader in enterprise application software. With a global network of customers, partners, employees, and thought leaders, SAP helps the world run better and improve people’s lives. SAP and AWS continue to collaborate to accelerate digital transformation and support their customers around the world. “As the market leader in enterprise application software with strong roots in Europe, SAP has long collaborated with AWS on behalf of customers to accelerate digital transformation around the world,” said Peter Pluim, president, SAP Enterprise Cloud Services and SAP Sovereign Cloud Services. “The AWS European Sovereign Cloud provides further opportunities to strengthen our relationship in Europe by enabling us to expand the choices we offer to customers as they move to the cloud. We appreciate the ongoing collaboration with AWS, and the new possibilities this investment can bring for our mutual customers across the region.”
Dedalus is one of the largest health software companies in the world, delivering healthcare software across the entire continuum of patient care. It serves 6,700 healthcare organizations, 5,700 diagnostic and lab centers, and hundreds of regions worldwide, helping caregivers look after over 540 million patients. Since 2021, Dedalus has been using AWS to provide healthcare software solutions, including native and platform services for Dedalus’ care records, as well as cloud-related deployment capabilities. “Today, we stand at the cusp of a transformative era. The introduction of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud does not merely represent an infrastructural enhancement, it is a paradigm shift,” said Andrea Fiumicelli, chairman at Dedalus. “This sophisticated framework will empower Dedalus to offer unparalleled services for storing patient data securely and efficiently in the AWS cloud. We remain committed, without compromise, to serving our European clientele with best-in-class solutions underpinned by trust and technological excellence.”
With locations in more than 20 countries and over 27,000 employees, T-Systems is one of the leading providers of digital services in Europe. The Deutsche Telekom subsidiary is headquartered in Germany and has a presence in Europe, as well as in select core markets and strategic production locations. T-Systems provides a global production and supply chain to companies operating worldwide. T-Systems and AWS entered a strategic collaboration in 2021 to support customers in their digital journey. “Deutsche Telekom welcomes the announcement of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, which highlights AWS’s dedication to continuous innovation for European businesses,” said Greg Hyttenrauch, senior vice president, Global Cloud Services at T-Systems. “The AWS solution will provide greater choice for organizations when moving regulated workloads to the cloud and additional options to meet evolving digital governance requirements in the EU.”
O2 Telefónica is one of the leading integrated telecommunications providers in Germany, with a customer base of over 44 million mobile and 2.3 million broadband subscriptions. Since 2020, O2 Telefónica has worked with AWS to speed up the progression of its network, amplify automation, and drive innovation at an accelerated rate. As part of its digital transformation process, the telecommunications provider has migrated a majority of its IT applications to AWS. “The new AWS European Sovereign Cloud can be a game-changer for highly regulated business segments in the European Union,” said Mallik Rao, chief technology and information officer at O2 Telefónica in Germany. “As a leading telecommunications provider in Germany, our digital transformation focuses on innovation, scalability, agility, and resilience to provide our customers with the best services and quality. This will now be paired with the highest levels of data protection and regulatory compliance that AWS delivers, and with a particular focus on digital sovereignty requirements. I am convinced that this new infrastructure offering has the potential to boost cloud adoption of European companies and accelerate the digital transformation of regulated industries across the EU.”
Commitment to sustainability
Amazon is committed to becoming a more sustainable business and reaching net-zero carbon across its operations by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement, as part of The Climate Pledge. Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge and became its first signatory in 2019. As part of its Climate Pledge commitment, Amazon is on a path to power its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of the original 2030 target. See Amazon’s public methodology for more on its approach. In 2022, Amazon set a new corporate record for the most renewable energy announced by a single company in one year and remains the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy—a position it’s held since 2020, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Amazon now has 401 renewable energy projects in 22 countries. Additionally, AWS will be water positive by 2030, returning more water to communities than it uses in its direct operations.
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