Digital Sovereignty Pledge gives customers control over their data

The Digital Sovereignty Pledge says that giving customers control over their data is a huge priority for AWS. However, the constantly evolving legal requirements have become burdensome and difficult. 

Laws and rules governing digital sovereignty are rapidly changing in many places of the world including Europe. Several clients have expressed concern over the past 18 months on having to choose between the full capability of AWS and a feature-restricted sovereign cloud option, which might constrain their ability to innovate, alter and grow. There is an astounding amount of complexity that customers must navigate through. 

AWS guarantees to provide customers total control over where their data is stored, verifiable control over how it’s accessed and the choice to always encrypt it, whether it is in memory, at rest or in transit. Their pledge hopes to ensure the clients that AWS ensures sovereignty capabilities in the cloud. Some of the features like AWS Control Tower already have some of these capabilities, but there are more in the future to come.

AWS also promised their cloud will be averse to network failures and natural disasters. This is not new and the majority of the other promises the company makes are also not either.

But the fact that AWS makes all of this obvious shows that the company sees this as an opportunity to differentiate itself from the competition as it bids for significant public sector contracts. It also makes it clear that it sees it as a threat because more and more of its customers are using local cloud services to help them solve their data sovereignty problems. 

The vast majority of public sector firms, after all, are not concerned with serving a global market, and the invention of containers and Kubernetes has made transferring workloads easier.