Trending Topics – AWS European Sovereign Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, a new cloud platform specifically tailored to European requirements for data protection, data sovereignty, and regulatory compliance. AWS describes it as a physically and logically separated cloud infrastructure. It will be operated entirely within the European Union and is intended to be particularly suitable for government agencies, critical infrastructure, and heavily regulated industries.

Certitude experts have doubts about whether the announced sovereignty can currently be achieved. The core of the criticism concerns actual control over central infrastructure components. “Both the domain structure and the underlying IP infrastructure are, to our current knowledge, indirectly or directly under the control of companies based in the USA,” says Florian Schweitzer, Cloud Security Expert at Certitude Consulting, based in Vienna. This would mean that the Sovereign Cloud – despite operation in the EU – is structurally tied to US law. “The announced separation is, by current standards, insufficient”, Certitude expert Florian Schweitzer explains on Trending Topics.