Amazon Web Services and SAP are extending their long-standing partnership with plans to make SAP solutions available on the new AWS European Sovereign Cloud platform. This is a strategic response from both technology giants to increasing regulatory pressure in the European Union and the market’s increasingly loud cry for digital sovereignty. The initiative is designed to allow customers in highly regulated sectors such as finance, health and government to use advanced cloud services, including AI, without concerns about data residency and security.
The concept of digital sovereignty is not new, but it has taken shape in Europe in recent years. Regulations such as NIS2 (on cyber-security), DORA (on digital operational resilience in the financial sector) or the general thrust of the GAIA-X project clearly point the way forward: key data of European companies and institutions is to be processed and stored within the EU, under the jurisdiction of EU law. This is a challenge for global cloud providers, especially those from the US, in the context of regulations such as the CLOUD Act.
The new AWS platform is intended to be a concrete solution to this problem. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud will be physically and logically isolated from existing AWS regions and managed exclusively by staff residing in the European Union. The first region of this new cloud is expected to be established in Brandenburg, Germany, by the end of 2025, and Amazon’s announced investment in the project is €7.8 billion.
For corporate customers, the strength of this partnership is to combine two key elements. On the one hand, they receive a dedicated AWS infrastructure, guaranteeing compliance with EU sovereignty requirements. On the other, access to SAP’s entire portfolio of business applications and analytics (including ERP systems), which are the lifeblood of many of Europe’s largest enterprises.
This will ensure that companies do not have to forgo innovation, such as implementing artificial intelligence models or advanced data analytics, for fear of breaching regulations.
Moving SAP Sovereign Cloud solutions onto the AWS platform in Europe is a natural step – similar models of cooperation between the two companies are already in place in the UK, Canada and Australia, among others.
For AWS, it is a way to maintain its dominant position in a strategic market, and for SAP to provide its key customers with a secure and compliant path to cloud transformation.
