Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's cloud computing business, confirmed more details on its European “sovereign cloud”, designed to enable greater data residency in the region.
The company said the first AWS sovereign cloud region would be in the German state of Brandenburg and would be operational by the end of 2025. AWS added that it plans to invest €7.8 billion (8 .5 billion dollars) in the facility until 2040.
The announcement, obviously timed to coincide with the AWS Berlin Summit which is being held today and tomorrow in the German capital, comes seven months after AWS first revealed its sovereign cloud plans.
Highly regulated
AWS has long offered localized data storage and processing in the European region, but public sector agencies and organizations operating in some highly regulated industries have been slower to move to the public cloud due to (mis)management issues. data, that is, regardless of Whatever policies and promises a hyperscaler may put in place, the data ultimately remains under the control of an American tech giant. As a result, the AWS European sovereign cloud comes with even broader data controls, allowing all eligible customers to keep all their metadata within the EU – and AWS employees based outside the EU would not be able to access it. nothing contained in the EU.
In other words, the sovereign cloud will be “physically and logically separated” from all other AWS regions.
AWS initially distanced itself from the concept of a “sovereign cloud”: Stephen Schmidt, Amazon's chief security officer, went so far as to call the sovereign cloud “a marketing term more than anything else”. However, at the end of 2022 AWS announced its “digital sovereignty commitment”, which set out to set in stone its commitments in terms of data control.
This change in tactics is due in part to growing regulatory pressure, but also because its major cloud competitors have thrown their weight behind the sovereign cloud push, including Microsoft, Googleand even Oracle, which launched its sovereign cloud for EU customers last June.
Part of its multibillion-dollar investment will include the creation of new roles to support Europe's sovereign cloud, such as software engineers, systems developers and solutions architects, while also saying it will support “on average 2,800 full-time equivalent jobs in local German companies” each year across its supply chain, covering disciplines such as construction, facilities maintenance and telecommunications.