Welcoming the AWS European Sovereign Cloud

Exciting times ahead for digitization in Europe and Germany specifically as Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently (Oct 24th) announced its “AWS European Sovereign Cloud”!?As I work for T-Systems International as a lead AWS consultant I have been asked by several colleagues and customers since then to share my opinion about it and put it a bit into context (personal view).

Deutsche Telekom is a large customer of AWS, adopting AWS as one of the strategic platforms for their workloads to achieve its mission of becoming the leading digital Telco. Also, it is well-known for being passionate and rigorous regarding data protection and security. The enterprise services branch of Telekom, T-Systems, is a Premier AWS partner and proven Managed Services Provider and thus I am glad about the quote of Greg Hyttenrauch , our Global Cloud Services SVP, that is included directly in the AWS announcement:?

“Deutsche Telekom welcomes the announcement of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, which highlights AWS’s dedication to continuous innovation for European businesses. The AWS solution will provide greater choice for organizations when moving regulated workloads to the cloud and additional options to meet evolving digital governance requirements in the EU.”?

?So, why is this AWS European Sovereign Cloud such a big thing??

• It will be a completely new region, located in Germany, with multiple Availability Zones for demanding resiliency requirements, and
• it will be independent from the global regions and operated by a team in the EU to meet European data sovereignty requirements.??

Too many details are not available at this time, but similar regions/partitions for special requirements are running for a longer time already, like the AWS China regions or the AWS US Gov Cloud that might give an orientation how this might eventually work.??

I am very glad about this announcement, because sovereignty requirements in the past quite often have been named by customers as a reason for not considering public cloud for a certain types of workloads (specific data classification). This will hopefully now change and unlock the values of public cloud for further use cases.

While the launch date for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud has not been shared yet, customers still do not need to wait for it to drive AWS adoption for their regulated workloads as technologies are available that can bridge the gap. For instance, T-Systems is providing External Key Management for AWS. Here the encryption keys are stored in a hardware security module running in a Telekom or customer datacenter instead of being persisted on AWS. That way, a high level of control is provided to customers about how the keys can be accessed and used. We also offer European based support and can configure the AWS Landing Zone of a customer with Data Protection as a Managed Service in line with the relevant compliance requirements. Also, from our customers we see that only a small number of workloads have the highest legal/sovereignty requirements. Most workloads can be deployed and operated on AWS in a secure and compliant way, as also shown by the many industry certifications AWS owns, e.g. C5.?

At T-Systems we have a lot of experience from various industry domains including regulated ones like public sector or healthcare, and proven AWS competencies (incl. Security and Migration). And of course, we will cover the new AWS Partition with our managed services and consultancy. We are happy to discuss with you the best options for your company or workload. Please reach out to me or my colleagues from the T-Systems AWS powerhouse (within Telekom known as #teamvirago) in case of any questions!