AWS is unveiling its latest initiative designed to help it remain the cloud leader: the AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge.

Digital sovereignty is an increasingly important aspect of cloud computing, as countries and jurisdictions endeavor to legislate privacy, security, and other online concerns. AWS has always strongly supported digital sovereignty, being the first major cloud provider to give customers the ability to control where their data was hosted, as well as how and where it moved.

The company is doubling down on that track record with its AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge, giving customers the most powerful tools available for managing digital sovereignty.

“Our approach to delivering on this pledge is to continue to make the AWS Cloud sovereign-by-design—as it has been from day one,” writes Matt Garman, Senior Vice President of AWS Sales, Marketing and Global Services. “Early in our history, we received a lot of input from customers in industries like financial services and healthcare—customers who are among the most security- and data privacy-conscious organizations in the world—about what data protection features and controls they would need to use the cloud.”

The company is applying this “sovereign-by-design” approach in several key areas:

• Control over data location
• Verifiable data access control
• Everything, everywhere encryption
• Cloud resilience

“At AWS, earning customer trust is the foundation of our business. We understand that protecting customer data is key to achieving this,” Garman continues. “We also know that trust must continue to be earned through transparency. We are transparent about how our services process and transfer data. We will continue to challenge requests for customer data from law enforcement and government agencies. We provide guidance, compliance evidence, and contractual commitments so that our customers can use AWS services to meet compliance and regulatory requirements. We commit to continuing to provide the transparency and business flexibility needed to meet evolving privacy and sovereignty laws.”