At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we continue to invest in and deliver digital sovereignty solutions to help customers meet their most sensitive workload requirements. To address the regulatory and digital sovereignty needs of public sector and regulated industry customers, we launched AWS Dedicated Local Zones in 2023, with the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech Singapore) as our first customer.

Today, we’re excited to announce expanded service availability for Dedicated Local Zones, giving customers more choice and control without compromise. In addition to the data residency, sovereignty, and data isolation benefits they already enjoy, the expanded service list gives customers additional options for compute, storage, backup, and recovery.

Dedicated Local Zones are AWS infrastructure fully managed by AWS, built for exclusive use by a customer or community, and placed in a customer-specified location or data center. They help customers across the public sector and regulated industries meet security and compliance requirements for sensitive data and applications through a private infrastructure solution configured to meet their needs. Dedicated Local Zones can be operated by local AWS personnel and offer the same benefits of AWS Local Zones, such as elasticity, scalability, and pay-as-you-go pricing, with added security and governance features.

Since being launched, Dedicated Local Zones have supported a core set of compute, storage, database, containers, and other services and features for local processing. We continue to innovate and expand our offerings based on what we hear from customers to help meet their unique needs.

More choice and control without compromise

The following new services and capabilities deliver greater flexibility for customers to run their most critical workloads while maintaining strict data residency and sovereignty requirements.

New generation instance types

To support complex workloads in AI and high-performance computing, customers can now use newer generation instance types, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) generation 7 with accelerated computing capabilities.

AWS storage options

AWS storage options provide two storage classes including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Express One Zone, which offers high-performance storage for customers’ most frequently accessed data, and Amazon S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access, which is designed for data that is accessed less frequently and is ideal for backups.

Advanced block storage capabilities are delivered through Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) gp3 and io1 volumes, which customers can use to store data within a specific perimeter to support critical data isolation and residency requirements. By using the latest AWS general purpose SSD volumes (gp3), customers can provision performance independently of storage capacity with an up to 20% lower price per gigabyte than existing gp2 volumes. For intensive, latency-sensitive transactional workloads, such as enterprise databases, provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) volumes provide the necessary performance and reliability.

Backup and recovery capabilities

We have added backup and recovery capabilities through Amazon EBS Local Snapshots, which provides robust support for disaster recovery, data migration, and compliance. Customers can create backups within the same geographical boundary as EBS volumes, helping meet data isolation requirements. Customers can also create AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies for their accounts to enable storing snapshots within the Dedicated Local Zone. To automate the creation and retention of local snapshots, customers can use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM).

Customers can use local Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to create and register AMIs while maintaining underlying local EBS snapshots within Dedicated Local Zones, helping achieve adherence to data residency requirements. By creating AMIs from EC2 instances or registering AMIs using locally stored snapshots, customers maintain complete control over their data’s geographical location.

Dedicated Local Zones meet the same high AWS security standards and sovereign-by-design principles that apply to AWS Regions and Local Zones. For instance, the AWS Nitro System provides the foundation with hardware- and software-level security. This is complemented by AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) and AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) for encryption management, Amazon Inspector, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Shield to help protect workloads, and AWS CloudTrail for audit logging of user and API activity across AWS accounts.

Continued innovation with GovTech Singapore

One of GovTech Singapore’s key focuses is on the nation’s digital government transformation and enhancing the public sector’s engineering capabilities. Our collaboration with GovTech Singapore involved configuring their Dedicated Local Zones with specific services and capabilities to support their workloads and meet stringent regulatory requirements. This architecture addresses data isolation and security requirements and ensures consistency and efficiency across Singapore Government cloud environments.

With the availability of the new AWS services with Dedicated Local Zones, government agencies can simplify operations and meet their digital sovereignty requirements more effectively. For instance, agencies can use Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to create new databases rapidly. Amazon RDS in Dedicated Local Zones helps simplify database management by automating tasks such as provisioning, configuring, backing up, and patching. This collaboration is just one example of how AWS innovates to meet customer needs and configures Dedicated Local Zones based on specific requirements.

Chua Khi Ann, Director of GovTech Singapore’s Government Digital Products division, who oversees the Cloud Programme, shared: “The deployment of Dedicated Local Zones by our Government on Commercial Cloud (GCC) team, in collaboration with AWS, now enables Singapore government agencies to host systems with confidential data in the cloud. By leveraging cloud-native services like advanced storage and compute, we can achieve better availability, resilience, and security of our systems, while reducing operational costs compared to on-premises infrastructure.”

Get started with Dedicated Local Zones

AWS understands that every customer has unique digital sovereignty needs, and we remain committed to offering customers the most advanced set of sovereignty controls and security features available in the cloud**.** Dedicated Local Zones are designed to be customizable, resilient, and scalable across different regulatory environments, so that customers can drive ongoing innovation while meeting their specific requirements.

Ready to explore how Dedicated Local Zones can support your organization’s digital sovereignty journey? Visit AWS Dedicated Local Zones to learn more.

TAGS: AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge, Digital Sovereignty, Security Blog, Sovereign-by-design, Public Sector, Singapore, AWS Dedicated Local Zones