Digital Sovereignty by DesignAWS European Sovereign Cloud
Convincing digital sovereignty thanks to robust security services and resilience & recovery tools
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Security and control up to the standard of the leading tech giants
Why a European cloud? This question is becoming increasingly prominent, both technologically and in the media: We are already familiar with the challenge of ever-increasing cyberattacks. However, growing geopolitical uncertainties worldwide are exacerbating the security situation when handling sensitive data. Furthermore, compliance requirements and new, EU-wide regulations have become non-negotiable triggers for companies to seek even more capable and reliable solutions that address all these challenges – driven above all by the need for digital sovereignty as a key element.
Well-known hyperscalers have already begun to respond to their customers' changing security needs and develop solutions that remain as unaffected as possible by these developments: European cloud usage without external access poses challenges for non-European providers. AWS has accepted and mastered these challenges: The result is the European Sovereign Cloud (ESC).
Famous hyperscalers have already begun to respond to their customers' changing security needs and develop solutions that remain as unaffected as possible by these developments. With the European Sovereign Cloud (ESC), companies don't have to forgo AWS's proven, future-proof cloud technology. Its architecture offers a new level of security in the cloud, protecting against attacks and manipulation from both inside and outside the organization. Thanks to end-to-end encryption, comprehensive control mechanisms, and its own Security Operations Center (SOC), the European Sovereign Cloud, as its name suggests, is entirely based in Europe – organizationally, technologically, and therefore also regulatory-wise. It is thus subject solely to European standards for regulatory security.
At Empalis, we see immediate opportunities in this development from AWS: Both for customers already in the cloud, enabling them to become significantly more resilient and to address their compliance and regulatory issues completely – seamlessly and flawlessly. And also for customers who currently associate a greater sense of security with on-premises solutions but, due to the (literal) costs of on-premises, are now considering exploring the cloud environment.
How does the European Sovereign Cloud differ from the AWS Cloud?
Although the AWS Cloud has been operating data centers in Europe for years, the security standards of the new European Sovereign Cloud are significantly more comprehensive:
- Data and all metadata remain within the EU.
- Operation is carried out by EU-based personnel, including technical support and security monitoring.
- The AWS ESC is based on the AWS Nitro System.
- Strict separation from other AWS Regions – both logically and physically.
The core principle behind the AWS European Sovereign Cloud is its complete independence, control, and flexibility, ensuring compliance with EU regulations such as the GDPR, NIS2, and the EU Data Protection Act – all without risk.
The Brandenburg region (Germany) was selected as the first ESC region, and AWS will roll out this concept EU-wide starting in 2026.
European Sovereignty – with AWS
AWS has implemented, both organizationally and in terms of regulations and technology, what is currently being discussed and is not available in this form in purely European solutions: hyperscale-level performance in every respect, plus full compliance with European regulations and innovative cyber resilience features.
AWS thus impresses not only technologically, but also demonstrably in terms of its ability to implement solutions – and is a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. As a pioneer of cloud services worldwide, AWS positioned itself with a considerable lead over the competition from the very beginning of cloud history.
With the establishment of ASW European Sovereign Cloud, AWS further distinguishes itself from well-known competitors in the hyperscale environment such as Google and Microsoft, and, with what we consider to be strategically sound solutions in its portfolio, also from European solutions – even though these are emerging.
The Top Features of the European Sovereign Cloud
AWS excels in its security services and resilience & recovery capabilities. A technology leader in areas such as security automation, logging, encryption, and API access control, its security services are natively integrated and auditable (including GuardDuty, Security Hub, Macie, and KMS).
Cloud-native features like AWS Resilience Hub, AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, and AWS Fault Injection Service meet regulatory requirements such as NIS2 and DORA.
Below, we present these three core features of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (ESC) – features that have so impressed us that we wouldn't want to be without this cloud in our portfolio.
The AWS Resilience Hub
The AWS Resilience Hub is a central platform within the AWS Management Console for efficiently managing and continuously monitoring your applications. Here, you define your resilience goals, assess the current status of your systems, and receive specific recommendations based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
Features of the AWS Resilience Hub
The AWS Resilience Hub provides strategic resilience in one place: security, control, and compliance at a glance.
- Quickly identify vulnerabilities
- Secure critical systems
- Ensure compliance and reporting during outages.
With the AWS Resilience Hub, you can identify vulnerabilities in your applications early on. Integrated tests, such as the AWS Fault Injection Service, allow you to simulate specific disruptions and realistically test alerts and recovery processes. This provides you with direct insights into how to specifically increase the resilience of your critical systems and efficiently implement recovery procedures.
In addition, the system automatically documents all events during planned or unplanned outages. This allows you to maintain an overview, meet regulatory requirements, and ensure your compliance – from risk analysis to auditing. You identify dependencies to address vulnerabilities – significantly strengthening the resilience of your systems.
Benefits of AWS Resilience Hub
You can continuously monitor the health of your applications and make improvements immediately. This allows you to reduce outages early on.
They examine and evaluate key performance indicators such as recovery time (RTO) and data recovery point objective (RPO). This ensures transparency and planning reliability.
AWS Resilience Hub detects risks and vulnerabilities before they reach production systems. This allows you to resolve problems early and prevent disruptions.
Targeted measures not only reduce downtime but also the costs of recovery and emergency operations. Your company remains operational – even in critical situations.
AWS Fault Injection Service
The AWS Fault Injection Service is a tool for controlled fault simulation (“chaos engineering”) in the cloud. It provides the controls and safeguards teams need to conduct tests in production environments, such as automatically resetting or terminating tests when specific conditions are met.
Benefits of the AWS Fault Injection Service:
- Weaknesses that are missed during traditional software testing are discovered.
- You can define specific conditions to terminate tests or revert to the state before the test.
- Pre-built scenarios from the FIS scenario library allow you to run tests in minutes.
- Working with realistic failure conditions provides a clear assessment of your systems' resilience.
With the AWS Fault Injection Service, you can quickly and precisely test how resilient and stable your applications are in real-world operation. Vulnerabilities are identified early, and you gain insights into performance and failure scenarios. This allows you to proactively secure your IT infrastructure before real-world problems occur.
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery allows you to eliminate unused recovery site resources and only pay for a full disaster recovery site when needed. Applications can be restored in minutes—to their most recent state or to a previous point in time.
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery has developed a unified process of testing, restoring, and failing back for every application, simplifying the process.
Actions such as environment configuration, cleaning up test resources, and enabling monitoring tools for running applications can be easily automated.
- Reduce costs thanks to affordable storage and low resource requirements
- Point-in-time recovery in minutes
- Widely compatible thanks to the unified process
Automation
How does AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery work?
With AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, you can minimize downtime and data loss and quickly and reliably restore any on-premises or cloud-based applications by continuously backing up your servers to an AWS Region of your choice.
This is highly cost-efficient thanks to AWS's staging area concept, which requires minimal storage and compute resources. You can also perform non-disruptive testing at any time and ensure operational readiness through regular recovery and failback checks.
If a disaster occurs, AWS applications can be restarted within minutes – either to their current state or to an earlier recovery point.
Once this is complete and the root cause is resolved, you have the option to remain in AWS or replicate your data back to your original system. Failback is always flexible.
Recovery with AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery: Use Cases
If hardware failures or unexpected events such as software problems occur in the data center, operations can be resumed within seconds (RPOs) and minutes (RTOs) using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery.
With the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, you can now confidently increase your resilience by using AWS as a recovery site – all while remaining fully compliant. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery supports this by converting cloud-based applications and making them usable for native execution on AWS.
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery enables you to restore applications hosted in one AWS Region to other AWS Regions. This improves the resilience and availability goals of your AWS-based applications.
Conclusion: Digital Sovereignty is not a product, but a level of maturity.
Data sovereignty underlies a sustainable, resilient recovery and resilience strategy to ensure operational capability in any situation. Therefore, from a technical perspective, cloud security is not solely a matter of product selection.
As resilience experts with many years of backup & storage and cyber resilience expertise, we combine cloud, backup & recovery with compliance and regulatory requirements, integrated and measurable within a sovereign, strategic approach.
With us, you receive all the advantages of:
- our trademark technical experience and in-depth expertise;
- our strong partnerships, especially leading leaders in the Gartner Quadrant;
- comprehensive cyber-resilient and operationally proven support from all organizational and regulatory perspectives.
We place great importance on personal service. Write to me, I'll be happy to answer your questions.
Philip Röder, Head of Business Development & Consulting
Phone +49 162 4196789
The AWS European Soverein Cloud is compatible with
What certifications does AWS European Sovereign Cloud hold?
The following certifications and control mechanisms ensure that AWS European Sovereign Cloud meets the highest data protection and security standards, safeguards digital sovereignty, and complies with the requirements of regulated industries and public sector clients in Germany and Europe.
Furthermore, AWS European Sovereign Cloud has its own European root Certificate Authority (CA), which generates and manages SSL/TLS certificates entirely within the EU, as well as its own Security Operations Center (SOC) under European management.
ISO/IEC 27001:2013
SOC 1, SOC 2 and SOC 3 Reports
BSI C5-certification
Sovereign Requirements Framework (SRF)
Find out what matters to you.
Learn about AWS European Sovereign Cloud: Write to me or get in touch with the company
Philip Röder, Head of Business Development & Consulting
Phone +49 162 4196789