Key Takeaways
- Commvault® is now available for AWS European Sovereign Cloud (AWS ESC). Organizations moving regulated workloads into AWS ESC can extend data protection, governance, and cyber resilience capabilities into this new sovereign cloud environment while helping maintain a consistent operating model.
- Sovereignty is about control, not just data location. Digital sovereignty requires organizations to address data locality, operational control, technology dependencies, and legal jurisdiction, not simply choose where data is stored.
- Commvault Geo Shield helps extend sovereignty controls into the data protection layer. The AWS ESC integration is part of Commvault’s broader Geo Shield strategy, designed to deliver consistent protection, governance, and recovery capabilities across sovereign, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
- Regulated organizations need both sovereignty and cyber resilience. As frameworks such as GDPR, DORA, NIS 2, and sector-specific requirements evolve, organizations must be able to demonstrate control over data while maintaining the ability to recover from cyber incidents and operational disruptions.
- Recovery readiness is a critical component of sovereignty. Beyond controlling where data resides, organizations need capabilities such as zero-trust controls, isolated and immutable backup copies, validated recovery capabilities, and cross-cloud recoverability to help organizations maintain confidence that data can be restored when needed.
European organizations have spent the past two years watching the ground shift under their feet. GDPR set the baseline. DORA raised the bar for financial services. The NIS 2 Directive pulled critical infrastructure into scope. And geopolitical uncertainty has turned what used to be a compliance checkbox into a board-level risk conversation.
Amazon Web Services built the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (AWS ESC) to meet this moment: a new, independent AWS partition launched in Brandenburg, Germany, operated under a dedicated German parent company with EU-resident leadership and staff, and physically separated from AWS’s other global regions.
Today, we’re announcing that Commvault® is generally available in the AWS ESC, giving customers that are migrating regulated workloads into this new region a way to help protect, govern, and recover that data without giving up the operating model they already know. This is also the latest expression of a wider strategy: Commvault Geo Shield, our approach to extending consistent protection, governance, and recovery across the environments where customers face sovereignty requirements, not just this one region.
Why Data Location Was Never the Whole Answer
We’ve made this point before on this blog: Sovereignty isn’t just about where a data center sits. It’s about who owns the building and the data inside it, who operates it, which laws govern it, who can access it, and what happens when those assumptions are tested.
This is the ground Commvault Geo Shield is designed to help customers address. Geo Shield is our portfolio of cyber resilience and sovereignty-supporting capabilities for organizations running hybrid and multi-cloud estates. The AWS ESC availability we’re announcing today is one expression of that broader strategy: consistent protection, governance, and recovery across the environments where sovereignty requirements apply, not just in this one region.
We look at digital sovereignty across four dimensions:
- Data locality: where your data and metadata actually live, and the controls governing how they’re stored, processed, and accessed.
- Technological sovereignty: the technical controls, key-management models, and in-region dependencies behind the platform.
- Operational sovereignty: who runs day-to-day operations, from where, and under what constraints.
- Jurisdictional sovereignty: the legal and regulatory framework under which the service actually operates.
This shift is reshaping how European technology buyers evaluate their options and make purchasing decisions. GDPR set the floor, but organizations increasingly measure providers against sharper yardsticks: Germany’s C5 attestation, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 for security operations, and sector overlays like KRITIS for critical infrastructure. The European Commission’s own sovereignty guidance goes further still, and bodies like the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) keep sharpening what “who can access it” means in practice.
None of these frameworks were written with backup and recovery specifically in mind, but they all start from the same assumption: You need to prove where control sits, not just where the data sits.
AWS ESC was built to strengthen several of those dimensions at the infrastructure layer. Commvault extends that further, up into the data protection and recovery layer, designed to help keep the workloads you move into AWS ESC recoverable, governed, and auditable once they’re there.
What This Means for Your AWS ESC Workloads
For customers evaluating or already migrating into AWS ESC, Commvault gives you a consistent way to:
- Help protect Amazon RDS, EC2, EKS, and S3
- Help support data residency requirements for backup data and metadata within the region, rather than relying on region choice alone to satisfy sovereignty expectations.
- Help maintain cross-region and cross-cloud recoverability, to help minimize the risk that a regional or provider-level disruption leaves you without a clean recovery path.
- Help apply role-based access control, encryption, and data segmentation, consistently across the workloads you run in AWS ESC.
- Use Commvault AirGap and Commvault Cleanroom™ to help isolate recovery points and validate restores before you trust them, helping produce recovery evidence that supports audit and incident response needs.
Commvault is designed to help build governance and recovery evidence that travels with the workload, not just the region, helping support your efforts to address obligations under DORA and NIS 2 None of this replaces the controls AWS ESC provides at the infrastructure level. It’s the layer above it: the part of the stack that determines whether you can actually get your data back, cleanly and on your terms, if something goes wrong.
Availability Today
Commvault in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud is available today. Commvault owns and operates the service through its US- and India-based teams and will continue to evaluate that operating model as sovereignty expectations in the market evolve.
If you’re already migrating workloads into AWS ESC, or evaluating whether to, this is a good time to start the conversation.
Getting Started
If you’re an existing Commvault customer, your account team can walk you through details and onboarding. If you’re new to Commvault and evaluating data protection for AWS ESC, please reach out to our team to set up a technical conversation.
Sovereignty programs don’t succeed because an organization picked the right region. They succeed because the organization can prove operational, technical, and legal control, and can recover cleanly across the environments where its workloads run. That’s what we built this to help with.
FAQs
Q: What is the AWS European Sovereign Cloud?
A: AWS European Sovereign Cloud (AWS ESC) is a dedicated AWS cloud environment designed to help customers meet European sovereignty requirements. Located in Germany and operated under a dedicated EU-based governance model, AWS ESC helps organizations address requirements related to data residency, operational control, and regulatory compliance while maintaining access to AWS cloud services.
Q: How does Commvault help support data protection in AWS ESC?
A: Commvault extends cyber resilience and data protection capabilities into AWS ESC through Commvault and Geo Shield. Organizations can help protect workloads such as Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3 while helping maintain governance, recoverability, auditing, and data security controls aligned with AWS sovereignty objectives.
Q: What is digital sovereignty, and why does it matter?
A: Digital sovereignty refers to an organization’s ability to maintain control over its data, technology, operations, and legal obligations. As regulations such as GDPR, DORA, and NIS 2 evolve, organizations are increasingly required to demonstrate not only where data resides, but also who can access it, how it is managed, and under which legal jurisdiction it operates.
Q: Is data residency the same as data sovereignty?
A: No. Data residency focuses on where data is stored, while data sovereignty encompasses broader considerations such as operational control, encryption and key management, governance, regulatory compliance, and legal jurisdiction. Organizations seeking sovereignty must address all of these dimensions, not just data location.
Q: How does Commvault Geo Shield help organizations address sovereignty requirements?
A: Commvault Geo Shield helps organizations address sovereignty requirements through capabilities that help support data locality, operational governance, cyber resilience, and recoverability across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The approach is designed to help organizations maintain consistent protection, compliance, and recovery controls across the environments where workloads are deployed.
Ruben Renders is a Solution Director, MSP, at Commvault.
