Q: What are Dedicated Local Zones?

AWS Dedicated Local Zones are a type of AWS Infrastructure designed to help governments, public sector, and regulated industry customers meet stringent security and compliance requirements for their sensitive data and applications. With Dedicated Local Zones, customers can work with AWS to deploy cloud infrastructure that is fully managed by AWS, built for exclusive use by a customer or community, and placed in a customer-specified location or data center to comply with regulatory requirements. AWS works with customers to configure their Dedicated Local Zones with enhanced security and governance capabilities to provide oversight and control over infrastructure access and operations, helping customers comply with regulatory requirements. 

Q: Who are AWS Dedicated Local Zones for?

AWS Dedicated Local Zones are for customers who have sensitive data and applications that need to run on physically separate infrastructure that is dedicated to their exclusive use and placed within a customer-specified regulatory jurisdiction to address security and compliance requirements.

Q: How are Dedicated Local Zones different from Local Zones?

AWS Local Zones are a type of AWS infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to customers for applications that require data residency or single-digit millisecond latency to end users. Any customer with an AWS account can utilize the resources on an AWS Local Zone. AWS Dedicated Local Zones are Local Zones that are built for the exclusive use by a customer or community. Dedicated Local Zones offer the same benefits as Local Zones and, as an additional benefit, AWS works with customers to provide the security and compliance features that they need on their own private zones. These features enable the customer to monitor and control access and operations on their Dedicated Local Zones.

Q: How are AWS Dedicated Local Zones different from AWS Outposts?

AWS Outposts is designed for workloads that need to remain on-premises due to latency requirements, where customers want those workloads to run seamlessly with their other workloads in AWS. AWS Outposts racks are fully managed and configurable compute and storage racks built with AWS-designed hardware that allow customers to run compute and storage on-premises, while seamlessly connecting to AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud.

AWS Dedicated Local Zones are designed to reduce the operational overhead of managing on-premises infrastructure at scale. Some customers have long-term, complex cloud migration projects and need infrastructure that seamlessly scales to support their large-scale demand. Some of these customers represent the interests of a customer community and also need multi-tenancy features to efficiently coordinate across their stakeholders. Dedicated Local Zones enable these customers to reduce the administrative burden of managing their own infrastructure on-premises with scalable, resilient, and multitenant cloud infrastructure that is fully AWS-managed and built exclusively for their use. 

Q: What features do Dedicated Local Zones provide to help customers meet their regulatory needs? 

AWS Dedicated Local Zones meet the same AWS security standards that apply to AWS Regions and AWS Local Zones, and are delivered with the AWS Nitro System to help ensure confidentiality and integrity of customer data. In addition, AWS works with customers to configure Dedicated Local Zones with features to help customers meet their regulatory requirements. These features include data access monitoring and audit programs, controls to limit infrastructure access to customer-selected AWS accounts, and options to enforce clearance criteria on local AWS operating personnel.

Q: What AWS services are available on Dedicated Local Zones?

With Dedicated Local Zones, customers can run their sensitive applications using AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon VPC, Amazon ELB, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and Amazon Direct Connect.

Q: How much do Dedicated Local Zones cost?

AWS Dedicated Local Zones costs are based on the location, data center, services, and features required to meet a customer’s needs. We review pricing with customers during the Dedicated Local Zones configuration process.

Q: How do I get started with Dedicated Local Zones?

Click here to connect with an AWS specialist and learn more about how AWS Dedicated Local Zones can be configured to meet your needs.