How healthcare organizations are advancing innovation while meeting digital sovereignty requirements with AWS

Healthcare is entering a new era. Advances in AI, data analytics, and cloud computing are creating opportunities ranging from accelerating drug discovery and enabling precision medicine to helping clinicians detect disease earlier and spend more time with patients.

As healthcare organizations embrace these technologies, they face an equally important responsibility: safeguarding some of the world’s most sensitive data. Patient records, medical images, genomic information, and clinical research data are foundational to modern healthcare—and protecting them is essential to maintaining trust.

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we believe healthcare organizations should be able to access the most advanced cloud and AI capabilities while maintaining control over their data, meeting regulatory requirements, and preserving patient trust.

Building on a sovereign-by-design foundation

Sovereignty has been a priority for AWS from the beginning. For nearly two decades, we’ve worked with healthcare organizations, governments, and other regulated industries around the world to help them securely manage sensitive workloads in the cloud. Our sovereign-by-design approach is built around providing customers with greater control and more choice without compromising on the full power of the cloud.

AWS offers a comprehensive set of technical measures, operational controls, and contractual protections that give customers control over the location of their data, who can access it, and how it is used. To provide greater transparency on how AWS services are designed and operated, we seek third-party attestations, accreditations, and certifications – supporting more than 140 security standards and compliance certifications globally.

Security is foundational to digital sovereignty, and it has always been our top priority. Every modern Amazon EC2 instance is powered by the AWS Nitro System, which provides zero operator access by design. This means there is no mechanism for anyone at AWS to access customer data on Nitro-based instances. The NCC Group, an independent cybersecurity firm, has validated this design. Combined with encryption capabilities through AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and AWS CloudHSM, customers can encrypt data in transit, at rest, and in memory — maintaining control over their cryptographic keys at every stage.

Transforming healthcare with AI

AI is rapidly becoming one of the most transformative technologies in healthcare. Organizations are already using AI to support medical imaging analysis, accelerate research, improve patient engagement, automate administrative workflows, and assist clinicians in making more informed decisions. Generative AI has the potential to further accelerate these efforts by helping healthcare professionals summarize information, extract insights from large datasets, and reduce administrative burdens that contribute to clinician burnout.

Services such as Amazon Bedrock enable customers to build and scale generative AI applications using a choice of foundation models — with enterprise-grade security, privacy, and governance controls built in. For healthcare-specific needs, AWS offers purpose-built agentic AI solutions like Amazon Connect Health for patient engagement and clinician workflows and Amazon Bio Discovery for drug discovery and life sciences research, alongside data infrastructure services like AWS HealthLake for health data interoperability, AWS HealthImaging for medical imaging at scale, and AWS HealthOmics for genomic and multi-omic data.

Global healthcare innovation in action

Around the world, healthcare organizations are demonstrating that digital sovereignty and innovation are not competing priorities. They are using AWS to modernize operations, improve patient outcomes, accelerate research, and increase efficiency—all while meeting their digital sovereignty requirements.

In Australia, eHealth NSW migrated ten clinical applications, including mission-critical workloads, from on-premises infrastructure to AWS. The initiative helped save more than 144,000 hours of productivity for frontline healthcare providers and reduced operational costs by millions of dollars, while continuing to meet Australian data sovereignty and privacy requirements.

In Germany, Climedo uses AWS to support electronic data capture (EDC) solutions for clinical trials. Clinical research organizations generate significant volumes of highly sensitive patient data. By using AWS services, including customer-managed encryption keys through AWS KMS, Climedo helps customers meet data residency and compliance requirements while accelerating clinical research initiatives.

In Canada, CBI Health migrated over 100 servers and 70 TB of sensitive health data from on-premises data centers to AWS in less than 100 days. By applying AWS Experience-Based Acceleration, CBI Health increased migration speed by 40 percent and reduced infrastructure costs by 60 percent. The migration provides CBI Health with a secure, scalable foundation to continue delivering rehabilitation and home health services to communities across Canada.

In Brazil, Sírio-Libanês Hospital migrated critical workloads to AWS and built a data lake, electronic medical records system, and telemedicine platform on AWS infrastructure in the São Paulo Region. The migration reduced security vulnerabilities by 82 percent and security issues by 53 percent — strengthening the hospital’s security posture for sensitive patient data.

Driving advancements with the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

Across Europe, digital sovereignty has become an increasingly important consideration for healthcare organizations seeking to modernize critical systems and accelerate AI adoption. To provide customers with an additional option for meeting their sovereignty requirements, we announced the general availability of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in January 2026— a new, independent cloud for Europe, entirely located within the EU, and physically and logically separate from other AWS Regions. Backed by a €7.8 billion investment, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud is the only fully featured, independently operated sovereign cloud designed to meet the stringent sensitive data needs of European governments and enterprises.

For healthcare organizations, this means the ability to deploy sensitive workloads in an environment designed to provide enhanced data residency, operational autonomy, governance, and transparency controls. It also allows organizations to pursue emerging opportunities in AI, advanced analytics, and digital health without compromise. Several organizations are already demonstrating what this means for healthcare innovation.

Dedalus supports hospitals and health systems serving over 540 million patients across more than 30 countries and is using the AWS European Sovereign Cloud to help providers modernize clinical workflows, reduce regulatory friction, and align with evolving European frameworks.

Medizinische Universität Lausitz – Carl Thiem (MUL-CT) is using the AWS European Sovereign Cloud to help accelerate medical research while meeting regulatory and compliance requirements, which will contribute to breakthroughs in imaging, genomics, and real-world evidence studies.

Arvato Systems is building its Health Cloud on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud to help healthcare organizations accelerate their digital transformation while meeting enhanced data residency and operational autonomy requirements.

The University Hospital Essen sees the AWS European Sovereign Cloud as a compelling foundation for advancing AI-driven healthcare research and clinical innovation at scale while meeting German and European sovereignty expectations.

Shaping the future of healthcare together

Protecting customer data in a world of changing regulations, technology, and risks takes teamwork. AWS works closely with customers, partners, policymakers, and regulators to help meet evolving sovereignty requirements while supporting innovation.

Today, dozens of AWS Partners hold the AWS Digital Sovereignty Competency, bringing deep expertise in designing and implementing sovereignty-aligned solutions, and more than 180 AWS European Sovereign Cloud Launch Partners are helping organizations across the public sector and regulated industries accelerate adoption and meet their specific requirements.

Healthcare deserves both the most advanced technology and the strongest protections. Together with our customers and partners, we’re working to make that a reality — accelerating discovery, improving patient outcomes, and building the next generation of healthcare services with confidence.

To learn more, visit AWS.EU or explore our digital sovereignty resources. Contact your AWS account team to discuss how we can help you advance healthcare innovation while meeting your sovereignty requirements.