Digital Sovereignty at AWS

More control, more choice

At AWS, we have always believed that for the cloud to realize its full potential it is essential that you have control over your data and choices for how you secure and manage your data in the cloud. We give you the flexibility to choose how and where you want to run your workloads.

The AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge is our commitment to offering AWS customers the most advanced set of sovereignty controls and features available in the cloud. We committed to expanding our capabilities to allow you to meet your digital sovereignty needs, without compromising on the performance, innovation, security, or scale of the AWS Cloud.

Delivering on the AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge

AWS European Sovereign Cloud

We've announced plans to launch the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, a new, independent cloud for Europe, designed to help public sector organizations and customers in highly regulated industries meet their evolving sovereignty needs. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will provide customers the capability to meet stringent operational autonomy and data residency requirements. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud is set to launch its first AWS Region in Germany by the end of 2025.

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AWS Dedicated Local Zones

To help customers comply with regulatory requirements, we introduced AWS Dedicated Local Zones, a type of 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. Dedicated Local Zones can be operated by local AWS personnel and offer the same benefits of AWS Local Zones, such as elasticity, scalability, and pay-as-you-go pricing, with added security and governance features.

Security

Sovereign-by-Design

Our approach to digital sovereignty is to continue to make the AWS Cloud sovereign-by-design—as it has been from day one. We will continue to architect and build AWS and deliver features and controls so that you can use AWS services while meeting your regulatory requirements.

You have always controlled the location of your workloads on AWS. You have the choice to deploy your customer data into any of our Regions around the world. You can also use AWS Dedicated Local Zones, where we work with you to configure your own Local Zones with the services and capabilities you need to meet your regulatory requirements.

With AWS, you control your data by using powerful AWS services and tools to determine where your data is stored, how it is secured, and who has access to it. For example, AWS Control Tower provides preventative, detective and proactive controls to help you meet your data residency requirements and purpose-built controls aggregated in a digital sovereignty category grouping.

We have designed and delivered first-of-a-kind innovation to restrict access to customer data. The AWS Nitro System, which is the foundation of AWS computing services, uses specialized hardware and software to protect data from outside access during processing on Amazon EC2. By providing a strong physical and logical security boundary, Nitro is designed to enforce restrictions so that nobody, including anyone in AWS, can access customer workloads on EC2 without your authorization. The security design of the Nitro System has also been independently validated by the NCC Group in a public report.

We give you features and controls to encrypt data, whether in transit, at rest, or in memory. All AWS services already support encryption, with most also supporting encryption with customer managed keys that are inaccessible to AWS operators. We commit to continue to innovate and invest in additional controls and encryption features for our customers to encrypt everything everywhere with encryption keys managed inside or outside the AWS cloud. If you have a regulatory need to store and use your encryption keys outside the AWS Cloud, you can use AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) External Key Store.

Control over workloads and high availability are essential in the case of events like supply chain disruption, network interruption, and natural disaster. At AWS, we’ve instilled resilience into our infrastructure, service design and deployment, operational model, and mechanisms to build more resilient cloud architectures. Each AWS Region is comprised of three or more Availability Zones (AZs), which are fully isolated infrastructure partitions. To achieve high availability, you can partition applications across multiple AZs in the same AWS Region.

AWS also makes it easier for you to design, build, and run highly available applications in the cloud. Our continuous resilience services, AWS Resilience Hub, AWS Fault Injection Service, AWS Backup, and AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, can help you analyze, test, and quickly recover your applications to improve your resilience posture. For customers that are running workloads on-premises or in intermittently connected or remote use cases, we offer services, such as AWS Outposts and AWS Snow Family, that provide specific capabilities for compute and storage on premises, and in remote or disconnected locations.

Transparency & Assurances

At AWS, earning customer trust is the foundation of our business. We understand that protecting your customer data is key to achieving this. We also know that trust must continue to be earned through transparency. We are transparent­ about how our services process and transfer data. We will continue to challenge requests for customer data from law enforcement and government agencies. We provide guidance, compliance evidence, and contractual commitments so that our customers can use AWS services to meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

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Trusted Partners

Our partners play a prominent role in helping customers meet their digital sovereignty requirements whether technical or operational.

AWS Digital Sovereignty Partners specialize in addressing customers’ digital sovereignty requirements while leveraging AWS services and controls. These partners are a community of validated AWS Partners with advanced AWS sovereignty experience, capabilities, and services. The Digital Sovereignty Partner community identifies AWS Partners with demonstrated expertise to advise and architect for their customers’ digital sovereignty needs, while maximizing the full potential of the AWS Cloud.

The Global Security & Compliance Acceleration (GSCA) Program assists AWS customers and partners in navigating security and compliance requirements, from migration to regulatory compliance. Led by AWS Security Partner Strategists and Solutions Architects, the GSCA program offers no-cost advisory services to address global security, regulatory, and compliance needs while connecting you with a trusted network of AWS partners to streamline your compliance journey to save time, reduce costs, and minimize complexities.

Connect with an AWS Digital Sovereignty Partner or get started in the GSCA program today to receive support with your digital sovereignty needs in the AWS Cloud.

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