Amazon Web Services (AWS) is undercutting the competition by pledging to abide by global data storage legislation.
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Countries from around the world have been increasingly cracking down on business data storage requirements, such as storing data abroad. Ultimately, cloud providers like AWS have been forced to get on board or face losing customers to local providers.
AWS is not the first cloud provider to bend its knee to international data laws. Microsoft and Google both offer data governance tools for their customers, but AWS has gone further, making digital sovereignty one of the core pillars of its cloud strategy. This could result in it stealing some big contracts away from competitors, as well as securing its own customer base.
Matt Garman, SVP, AWS Sales and Marketing at Amazon, said: “We’ve always believed that for the cloud to realize its full potential, it would be essential that customers have control over their data.
“Giving customers this sovereignty has been a priority for AWS since the very beginning when we were the only major cloud provider to allow customers to control the location and movement of their data.
“The importance of this foundation has only grown over the last 16 years as the cloud has become mainstream, and governments and standards bodies continue to develop security, data protection, and privacy regulations.
“Today, having control over digital assets, or digital sovereignty, is more important than ever.”
As digital sovereignty policies have been rapidly changing over the past 12 months in places like Europe, AWS says its customers are concerned that they will be forced to choose between AWS and a lesser sovereign cloud solution.
To allow its customers to continue using its services, AWS is expanding on its data protection features, contractual commitments, and accreditations to provide customers with control over their data without compromising on the overall quality of service.
The company has pledged investments in four key areas. First, it will expand on its existing services and features to provide greater data residency controls and transparency.
Second, it will continue building access restrictions that limit access to customer data unless requested by a customer or trusted partner. AWS has already delivered the AWS Nitro System to protect data from outside access and enforce restrictions to prevent anybody from accessing customer workloads.
Third, AWS commits to invest in additional controls for sovereignty and encryption features. Currently, its services already support encryption, with most including customer-managed keys that are not even accessible to AWS.
Finally, AWS will enable customers to partition applications over multiple AZs in the same AWS Region. It will also provide services that offer capabilities for offline data, remote computing and storage. The company claims already to have the highest network availability of any cloud provider.
