Introducing the Overview of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud whitepaper

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently released a new whitepaper, Overview of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, available in English, German, and French, detailing the planned design and goals of this new infrastructure. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is a new, independent cloud for Europe, designed to help public sector organizations and customers in highly regulated industries meet their evolving sovereignty and compliance needs. This effort, backed by a €7.8 billion investment in infrastructure, jobs creation, and skills development, will launch its first AWS Region in the State of Brandenburg, Germany by the end of 2025.

This whitepaper provides a broad overview of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud highlighting how AWS is helping customers achieve their sovereignty requirements while benefitting from access to the full power of AWS.

Key aspects covered in the whitepaper include:

• Infrastructure – Dedicated physical infrastructure with multiple Availability Zones, following the established AWS Regional model approach
• Logical isolation – Logical separation from existing AWS Regions, with independent billing, account, and identity systems
• Operational control – Measures to help assure independent operation of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, including staffing requirements
• Data sovereignty – Design that helps make sure customer content and customer-created metadata remain within EU boundaries unless customers choose otherwise
• Corporate governance – A distinct corporate structure under EU law, with EU nationals serving as managing directors and an independent advisory board
• Approach to law enforcement requests – The technical, operational, and legal measures implemented to help protect customer data and manage law enforcement requests

The whitepaper describes how these elements work together to deliver sovereign control and operational autonomy of our expansive service portfolio to meet Europe’s digital sovereignty needs. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be the only fully featured, independently operated sovereign cloud backed by strong technical controls, sovereign assurances, and legal protections designed to meet the needs of European governments and enterprises. Customers and partners using the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will benefit from the full power of AWS including the same service portfolio, security, availability, performance, architecture, APIs, and innovations such as the AWS Nitro System.

We have already made—and will continue to make—new investments in the design, development, and operation of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. We are building on the strong foundation that has underpinned AWS services for years, including our long standing commitment to customer control over data residency, our design principal of strong regional isolation, our deep European engineering roots, and our more than a decade of experience operating multiple independent clouds for the most critical and restricted workloads.

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