Dive Brief:
- AWS tapped Stéphane Israël as managing director of its European Sovereign Cloud unit starting in October, the company said in a Monday announcement. Prior to the appointment, Israël served for nine months as a partner in Boston Consulting Group’s industrial goods practice.
- Israël joins a team that includes VP of AWS Industries Kathrin Renz, who added managing director of the EU cloud unit to her portfolio in June, as well as AWS VP of Sovereign Cloud Max Peterson and several other executives, the company confirmed via email. Renz and Israël will both serve in managing director roles for the EU buildout, and Peterson will move to a leadership role in the company’s public sector business in October, the company said.
- AWS aims to launch the European Sovereign Cloud by the end of the year. The hyperscaler announced the plan in 2023 amid rising EU data privacy concerns, pledged 7.8 billion euros to the effort through 2040 last year and created an independent, EU-based parent company and security operations center for the venture in June.
Dive Insight:
As organizations migrate masses of data to public cloud platforms crawling with large language models, governments are scrambling to erect security guardrails.
The push toward sovereign cloud is particularly intense in the EU, where its executive branch, the European Commission, began work on a cloud and AI development initiative in April to complement its five-point action plan to triple data center capacity and bolster data readiness. Boosting technological resilience and sovereignty are two primary goals cited by the commission in a preliminary document.
“The initiative will create the right conditions for the private sector to build out sustainable cloud and edge capacity in the EU and address the current data center capacity gap with the underlying objective to strengthen the EU’s competitiveness and sovereignty,” the commission said.
Cloud vendors saw the writing on the wall and raced to respond.
Last week, AWS expanded its alliance with SAP to make the Germany-based ERP giant’s sovereign cloud capabilities available on the hyperscaler’s EU public cloud. SAP pledged to pour more than $23 billion into adding capacity to its data centers in Europe earlier this month.
Microsoft upgraded security in its existing sovereign cloud offering and rolled out a sovereign private cloud option for customers in Europe earlier this year.
Google Cloud also added sovereignty features this year and leaned on partners in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the U.S. to add sovereign cloud regions. The company chalked up a data sovereignty win earlier this month when it inked a 400 million-pound cloud deal with the U.K. Ministry of Defence.
AWS is building its first sovereign EU region in Brandenburg, Germany, according to a July blog post. To assure sovereignty, daily operations, access to data centers, and technical and customer services support will be handled only by employees residing in the EU, the company said.
