BTC and Esri deliver sovereign GIS on AWS European Sovereign Cloud

Organizations across energy, KRITIS, and public sectors rely on GIS for critical use cases including network planning, pipeline monitoring, emergency simulations, digital twins, and NIS2-compliant geoplatforms. These workloads process sensitive geospatial data that, if exposed, could compromise national security or critical infrastructure operations.

Legacy GIS infrastructure can be expensive and hard to scale. On-premises systems require time-consuming manual capacity planning for fluctuating workloads, and hardware refresh cycles create recurring capital expenditure that strains budgets. Public cloud GIS services offer better scalability, but to meet EU data residency requirements, they must have built-in zero-operator access—a security model that prevents access to customer data by any party. Fragmented compliance frameworks spanning multiple subsidiaries create regulatory overhead and delay approvals for KRITIS and public sector deployments. The challenge for BTC was to combine the scalability and operational efficiency of the cloud with the sovereignty guarantees that these regulated sectors demand. To meet this challenge, BTC selected AWS as its infrastructure provider.

BTC designed and operates the EU Sovereign Location Service as a fully managed solution running Esri ArcGIS technology within the AWS European Sovereign Cloud in Brandenburg, Germany. BTC selected this environment because it is a separate cloud partition, logically and physically independent from existing AWS Regions, with its own billing, account, and identity systems, operated exclusively by qualified EU-based staff that are organized under EU law. This gave BTC the foundation to build a sovereign GIS service without depending on feature-limited alternatives.

The solution runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity. Specifically, it uses AWS Nitro System instances—a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor—which enforce a zero-operator access model at the hardware level and offloads networking, security, and storage to AWS-designed hardware. By design, there is no mechanism for any system or person to log into Amazon EC2 Nitro hosts, or access customer data that is stored on encrypted instance storage or Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes, which are storage volumes that are attached to Amazon EC2 instances. BTC deployed the service across multiple Availability Zones for high availability and resilience, with each zone featuring independent power, networking, and connectivity. Amazon CloudWatch helps users observe and optimize workloads at scale by providing monitoring and observability for the secured EU-based API endpoint. The solution’s cartographic foundation includes ArcGIS StreetMap Premium Europe and content from ArcGIS Data Appliance Advanced, with Esri providing data only and retaining no infrastructure or user data access.

All geospatial and metadata remains within the EU with zero third-party access. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is designed to operate without dependency on non-EU infrastructure, remaining viable for workloads indefinitely even in exceptional circumstances. AWS CloudTrail tracks user activity and API usage, providing immutable, validated logs for auditability, and BTC’s triple ISO certification delivers independently verified compliance. The service scales through a usage-based shared-service model, eliminating upfront hardware investment and supporting fluctuating demand across basic spatial services, navigation, geocoding, and enterprise-tier configurations.

The EU Sovereign Location Service delivers EU data residency with zero third-party access to geo- and metadata, addressing the core sovereignty requirement for organizations handling sensitive geospatial workloads. BTC operates the solution autonomously from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland without vendor access to infrastructure, which means that customers do not need to build or maintain in-house GIS operations teams. Triple-certified compliance under ISO 27001, ISO 27017, and ISO 9001 reduces regulatory overhead and accelerates approvals for KRITIS and public sector deployments, replacing fragmented compliance frameworks with a single, independently verified governance model.

The shared-service model transforms GIS systems from capital expenditure to usage-based costs with no upfront infrastructure investment, and elastic scaling removes on-premises capacity planning requirements. This helps organizations absorb demand fluctuations without overprovisioning while freeing engineering teams to focus on higher-value geospatial analysis. “The integration of our location services into the AWS European Sovereign Cloud is an important step toward offering our European customers maximum security and flexibility,” says Jürgen Schomakers, CEO of Esri Deutschland, highlighting information shared in the article “Esri Germany and BTC AG bring Location Services to the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.” “This helps us to support companies and government agencies in implementing their digital transformation projects with confidence and in compliance with regulations. We want to support our customers to combine modern GIS and cloud technology while retaining full control.”

A market leader in GIS, Esri Deutschland empowers businesses and public sector organizations with mapping, analytics, and location intelligence.