The Future of EU Organizations With Sovereign Cloud

In the rapidly shifting digital landscape of 2026, every organization has reached a critical crossroads. For years, the conversation centered around digital transformation as a simple migration to the cloud. Today, that conversation has matured into something far more sophisticated and necessary. The modern mandate is to take complex, regulated organizations that are often weighed down by legacy infrastructure and turn them into autonomous, sustainable, and sovereign digital entities.

At Atos, we believe this evolution is powered by three primary engines: sophisticated AI agents, modern cloud architectures, and built in compliance, along with consistency between these engines being pivotal. Our goal is to enable organizations to run operations that are not only efficient but also self-governed and resilient against the shifting sands of regional regulations.

By industrializing AI agents on AWS, we are creating a future where migrations are autonomous, and application refactoring is inherently AI-centric. While the industrialization of AI agents promises speed and scale, the AWS European Sovereign Cloud (ESC) ensures these agents operate within a sovereign-by-design environment. This means that for European customers, the future of autonomous migration is not just fast, but legal and operational within EU jurisdictions.

The Sovereignty Challenge: Moving Beyond a One-Size-Fits-All Approach

For organizations operating in highly regulated environments such as the public sector, defense, and healthcare, the standard approach to cloud adoption has often proven insufficient. These entities face a binary choice that, until now, seemed impossible to reconcile: a complex and growing cloud dimension, as well as the need for hyperscaler innovation speed versus the strict requirements of sovereignty with its increased cost companion.

Traditional one-size-fits-all cloud strategies frequently fail to address the complex legal or self-imposed legacy dependencies that European organizations face. This includes concerns over the applicability of extra-territorial laws and regulations, as well as the absolute requirement for verifiable technical control over data encryption and operator access. As we navigate the 2026 evolution of the EU Data Act, the AI Act, and the overall geopolitical uncertainties, sovereignty has shifted from being a specialized niche to a non-negotiable business requirement.

Elucidating the Problem Statement

Regulatory pressure is intensifying.

Across Europe, our customers are facing a challenge: they must innovate while simultaneously meeting increasingly stringent sovereignty, security, and regulatory requirements. For organizations in regulated industries, it directly impacts their ability to modernize.

With the full implementation of the EU AI Act, DORA, and NIS2, organizations must ensure total data control, auditability, and operational resilience. Many organizations struggle to bridge the gap between the rapid pace of cloud innovation and their national security obligations or their strategic imperative to maintain freedom of choice and control. This struggle often results in a sovereignty gap, where innovation is stalled by compliance fears.

Delivering A Modular Sovereign Framework

A modular sovereign framework helps organizations build resilience to align with various mandates and bridge this sovereignty gap.

Atos delivers a sovereign-by-design cloud and AI ecosystem on AWS that specifically addresses these European regulatory and trust requirements. Our framework aligns with AWS technology to deliver varying levels of assurance tailored to specific jurisdictional needs.

With this, our customers can define exact jurisdictional boundaries and control plane locations. Whether an organization needs a trusted cloud configuration of workloads against defined sovereign control frameworks or a completely disconnected onsite sovereign cloud, Atos provides the modularity to make it happen, and to maintain the sovereign configurations during operation. This approach ensures European standards like NIS2 are met without sacrificing the hyperscaler benefits of the AWS platform.

Through EU AI Act, DORA, and NIS2, Atos ensures continuous audit readiness: we allow organizations to modernize legacy environments, industrialize AI agents, and accelerate transformation

Key AWS Services and Partner Integrations

Atos leverages a specialized suite of tools and partnerships to achieve this level of control and conformity:

Infrastructure and data residency: We utilize a secure resilient cloud platform — the AWS ESC, which acts as an isolated cloud partition, along with AWS Outposts for local processing. This ensures both customer content and metadata remain within the required borders, and cloud operations are led under EU jurisdictional control.
Advanced encryption: Through the AWS External Key Store (XKS) and AWS CloudHSM, we provide single tenant control. This allows for Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) and Hold Your Own Key (HYOK) capabilities, giving the customer total authority over their data.
Technological building blocks: Eviden is a part of the Atos Group. As part of our modular sovereign framework solution, we integrate proprietary Eviden solutions, like Eviden KMS for advanced European developed secured Key Management and Eviden Data Protect HSM products. These tools protect sensitive business data in compute as well as when it transitions from the edge to the cloud.
Compliance and governance: Harnessing AWS AI-powered services, we can provide auditable evidence that the infrastructure adheres to the required European regulatory and sovereign control expectation.

Regulatory As Code: The 2026 Compliance Standard

One of the most significant hurdles for modern organizations is being audit-ready.
Sovereign control is a key design principle, and in a landscape governed by the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and NIS2, compliance cannot be a periodic check; it must be continuous.

Atos provides automated compliance templates that align specifically with 2026 regulatory specifications. We call this Regulatory as Code. By automating the guardrails, we allow our customers to maintain a state of constant compliance. If a configuration drifts or a new regulation is introduced, the system identifies and remediates the issue automatically, ensuring the organization is always ready for a snap audit.

Sovereignty in Action: Cloud for Clinics (CfC)

One example of our sovereign strategy in action is the Cloud for Clinics (CfC) platform. This joint offering with AWS is funded by a Strategic Collaboration Agreement, specifically designed to provide a compliant and secure basis to allow modernization and innovation in hospital and clinic operations in the DACH region, i.e. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This highlights the importance of industry lenses, focusing on the seamless implementation of detailed sovereignty controls to enable business needs, regulations guardrails and risk profiles.

Embedding Cybersecurity Across the Digital Estate

As organizations accelerate their digital transformation through AI agents, their digital footprint becomes more distributed along the cloud-to-edge continuum. This expansion often leads to misconfigurations, which remain the primary vector for cloud compromises. Furthermore, organizations now face sophisticated, AI-driven threats that can bypass traditional, static defenses.

Atos addresses this by embedding an AI-powered cybersecurity suite directly into every transformation journey. We provide Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and Cyber Resilience services that identify, neutralize, and recover from threats at remarkable speeds. Our global network of Security Operations Centers (SOCs) uses high performance computing to provide 24/7 incident alerting. This ensures that as an organization moves toward an autonomous model, its security posture is just as adaptive and intelligent as its operations with sovereign controls at the heart of execution.

Collaborating on a Strategic Roadmap for 2025-28

Atos has achieved the AWS Digital Sovereignty Competency and is currently engaged in high-level discussions about the AWS ESC. Our ambition for the 2025 to 2028 period is clear: to lead the market in sovereign cloud adoption.

Atos stands as a uniquely qualified partner for this journey because of our deep European roots. With our headquarters in France, a strong European workforce, an extensive network of European data centers and delivery centers, and our unique European encryption solutions, we offer a differentiated proposition. Through our heritage of longstanding relationships with Defense and other critical operators in Europe, we understand the nuances of national security obligations and European regulatory trust because they are part of our identity.

We have demonstrated our capability to build and manage solutions with the highest sovereign requirements through our work with Eviden to develop Hardware Security Module (HSM) as a service and our successful encryption deployments with the Eviden KMS solution.

We are not just helping organizations move to the cloud; we are helping them claim their digital sovereignty and maintain their posture with strength.

>> Connect with us to learn more about the difference we are making in the EU cybersecurity landscape with modular sovereign frameworks.

>> Explore how Eviden, part of Atos Group, enables your business to migrate and run digital assets on AWS while meeting your sovereignty requirements: https://eviden.com/solutions/cybersecurity/digital-sovereignty/digital-sovereignty-for-aws/

Posted 25/02/26