Meeting Digital Sovereignty Requirements with Amazon Web Services Dedicated Local Zones

Amazon Web Services continues to invest in cloud solutions that address the most demanding digital sovereignty and regulatory requirements. To support public sector organizations and customers in highly regulated industries, AWS introduced Dedicated Local Zones in 2023—starting with the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech Singapore) as the first customer.

Dedicated Local Zones are fully managed AWS infrastructure, deployed for the exclusive use of a single customer or community and located in a customer-specified data center or location. They combine the elasticity, scalability, and pay-as-you-go pricing of AWS with enhanced security, governance, and data isolation capabilities.

With the latest expansion of supported services, AWS Dedicated Local Zones now provide customers with even more choice and control for running their most sensitive workloads—without compromising on performance or compliance.

Expanded Services: More Choice and Control Without Compromise

The newly available services enhance customers’ ability to meet strict data residency and sovereignty requirements while supporting advanced workloads.

Next-Generation Compute Capabilities

Dedicated Local Zones now support newer-generation Amazon EC2 instance types, including generation 7 instances with accelerated computing. These capabilities are designed to support demanding workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and high-performance computing (HPC), all within a controlled and sovereign environment.

Advanced AWS Storage Options

Customers can now benefit from additional AWS storage services within Dedicated Local Zones, including:

• Amazon S3 Express One Zone – High-performance object storage for frequently accessed data
• Amazon S3 One Zone–Infrequent Access – Cost-effective storage for backups and less frequently accessed data

For block storage, AWS offers:

• Amazon EBS gp3 volumes – General purpose SSD storage with independently configurable performance and up to 20% lower cost per GB compared to gp2
• Amazon EBS io1 volumes – High-performance, low-latency storage for mission-critical transactional workloads such as enterprise databases

These options allow organizations to keep data within a defined perimeter while meeting strict isolation and residency requirements.

Local Backup and Recovery Capabilities

AWS has expanded backup and recovery features with Amazon EBS Local Snapshots, enabling customers to create and retain backups entirely within the same geographic boundary as their Dedicated Local Zone.

Key capabilities include:

• Local disaster recovery and data migration support
• Snapshot retention policies managed with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM)
• Fine-grained access control using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Customers can also create and manage local Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) using locally stored snapshots, ensuring full control over where data resides throughout its lifecycle.

Built on AWS Security and Sovereign-by-Design Principles

Dedicated Local Zones adhere to the same high security standards as AWS Regions and Local Zones, including:

• AWS Nitro System for hardware- and software-level isolation
• AWS Key Management Service (KMS) and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for encryption and certificate management
• Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, and AWS Shield for threat detection and protection
• AWS CloudTrail for full audit logging of user and API activity

These capabilities help customers meet regulatory, compliance, and security requirements while maintaining operational efficiency.

Supporting Your Digital Sovereignty Journey with Softprom

Every organization faces unique sovereignty, compliance, and operational challenges. AWS Dedicated Local Zones are designed to be flexible, resilient, and adaptable across different regulatory environments. As an official AWS partner, Softprom supports customers throughout the entire journey—from sovereignty assessment and architecture design to deployment and ongoing optimization of Dedicated Local Zones. Our expertise helps organizations balance innovation with compliance while confidently running sensitive workloads in the AWS Cloud.