CREDIT: AWS
Localisation and replication are central to meeting sovereignty requirements For regulated customers across Europe, assurance is not a secondary concern – it is often the deciding factor in cloud adoption. AWS has developed a Sovereignty Reference Framework, translating compliance requirements from customers and regulators across Europe into hundreds of documented evidence points.
“ In the case of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, our localisation and replication really focused on meeting our customers’ assurance needs,” Colm says.“ We wanted to be sure that customer data and customer-created metadata always stayed within the EU, and that only our EU staff had any permissions or authority over that data.”
The physical architecture supports this: data centres and availability zones built exclusively for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, logically and physically separate from the broader AWS estate, operated exclusively by EU residents, and with no critical dependencies on systems outside the EU. Colm is careful to note that AWS’ standard regions are already sovereign by design, but the AWS European Sovereign Cloud went considerably further.“ We also built additional back-end systems,
28 July 2026