AWS European Sovereign Cloud

Not with our approach. We build and operate a controlled, auditable cross-partition bridge between your ESC environment and your existing commercial AWS partition. Your regulated workloads run in the sovereign environment while your broader AWS estate continues to function alongside it. The bridge uses Terraform, HashiCorp Vault, and short-lived STS credentials, with no static IAM and a full audit trail on every cross-boundary operation.

No. ESC is designed as a complement to your existing AWS estate, not a forced replacement. The typical starting point is identifying the specific workloads that carry regulatory risk, those subject to GDPR data residency requirements, NIS2 audit obligations, sector-specific rules, or workloads where CLOUD Act exposure is a board-level concern. We scope the migration around those workloads and build the cross-partition bridge to keep everything else running as-is.

Yes, ESC carries a cost premium over standard AWS regions such as eu-central-1 (Frankfurt). Based on early pricing calculator data, the uplift sits at roughly 15% across common services , New AWS ESC Price Calculator: https://pricing.calculator.aws.eu/#/

AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) 2.0 provides credits to offset the "double-bubble" cost of running old infrastructure and AWS simultaneously during a migration. For ESC migrations, the threshold is €500K in migration scope (meaning the expected AWS revenue from migrated workloads, not consulting fees). Above that, full MAP 2.0 applies with a two-tranche credit model. Below €500K, MAP Lite applies. We manage the entire procurement process on your behalf.

It means no one (not AWS, not CBTW, not any system) holds permanent credentials that could be used to access your environment at any time. Instead, our architecture uses HashiCorp Vault to generate short-lived STS credentials on demand, scoped to the exact operation being performed and expiring automatically after use. Every access attempt is logged in a full audit trail. Through AWS Nitro System Hypervisor Architecture not even AWS can have access to company data.

It depends on the scope and complexity of the workloads being moved. A focused migration of one or two regulated workloads can move in weeks. Larger migrations covering multiple teams, data pipelines, and identity systems are typically phased. We start every engagement with a scoping phase to define the migration boundary, assess cross-partition bridge requirements, and produce a phased roadmap before any infrastructure work begins.

The ESC infrastructure is located in Brandenburg, Germany, and is governed by EU law, accessible to organizations across the EU, not only German companies. AWS has committed to also launching new “Sovereign Local Zones” in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Early adopters include regulated sectors: EWE AG (energy and telco, 11,000+ employees), Medizinische Universitat Lausitz - Carl Thiem (state medical university, ~1,200 beds), and Sanoma Learning (K12 EdTech, 11 countries, ~25M students). Banking, healthcare, public sector, and critical infrastructure are the primary verticals seeing immediate regulatory pressure.