Across the European Union (EU), organizations face increasing pressure to meet data sovereignty, regulatory, and security requirements in the cloud without slowing innovation. This isn’t easy to do alone. Different compliance requirements vary by country, sector, and data classification. As cloud environments grow and configuration drift introduces risk over time, organizations have had little choice but to put together a solution themselves using time and resources they don’t have.
Until now. With CIS Hardened Images® available in the AWS European Sovereign Cloud via the AWS Console, organizations can deploy secure-by-default virtual machine (VM) images in a cloud environment designed to support European sovereignty requirements, helping them to reduce risk, improve consistency, and simplify secure cloud operations.
Why the AWS European Sovereign Cloud Matters
The AWS European Sovereign Cloud (ESC) helps to address the challenges discussed above by bringing together a community of aligned European countries under a shared set of sovereignty, data residency, and operational controls.This provides a dedicated cloud environment designed to support sovereignty, residency, and control requirements across participating European countries with clear, centralized guidance for how workloads are built and operated.
Independently operated and located entirely within the EU, the AWS ESC enables customers to run higher-sensitivity workloads and meet stringent EU data residency and regulatory compliance requirements while getting the same security, availability, and performance they get from existing AWS Regions today.
However, data sovereignty alone does not guarantee security. Secure cloud adoption also depends on how workloads are configured, deployed, and maintained. Misconfigurations remain one of the most common causes of cloud security incidents, often introduced during initial setup.
That’s where secure-by-default infrastructure becomes essential.
What Are CIS Hardened Images?
CIS Hardened Images® are virtual machine images that are pre-configured to align with the CIS Benchmarks®, which are globally recognized, consensus-based best practices for securely configuring operating systems, cloud providers, and other technology.
Each CIS Hardened Image provides:
- A secure configuration baseline aligned to CIS Benchmark recommendations
- Consistent hardening settings that help reduce configuration drift
- Initial hardening and regular updates performed by the Center for Internet Security® (CIS®) using third-party automation to address security patches and platform changes
- Documentation that supports security review and compliance validation
Want to learn more about how CIS Hardened Images help you to reduce misconfigurations? Check out our video below.
Secure-by-Default Compute in a Sovereign Cloud Environment
The launch of CIS Hardened Images in the AWS ESC brings together two complementary capabilities: a sovereign cloud foundation and pre-hardened compute resources.
This combination helps organizations:
- Reduce misconfiguration risk at deployment: CIS Hardened Images take the guesswork out of secure configuration management with an out-of-the-box solution that is already configured to meet stringent security guidelines.
- Standardize secure configurations across teams and environments: Every instance created using these images is consistently configured according to the industry-recognized hardening standards of the CIS Benchmarks, which are developed by an international community of IT experts via consensus.
- Accelerate time to secure workloads from a trusted security baseline without sacrificing control. CIS Hardened Images can be deployed in minutes into your existing cloud infrastructure.
- Simplify audit preparation, internal security reviews, and other compliance efforts. CIS Hardened Images are pre-configured to the CIS Benchmarks, guidelines which are themselves referenced by many regulatory frameworks. Organizations can thus use these resources to gain a repeatable approach to meeting their evolving regulatory requirements.
- Reduce operational burden on security and platform teams. With the built-in security of the CIS Hardened Images, teams can dedicate their time and resources to other critical aspects like vulnerability management and monitoring for configuration drift.
Pre-hardened images also integrate into existing infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD workflows, making them suitable for both modern cloud-native teams and more traditional environments.
Getting Started with CIS Hardened Images in the AWS ESC
Organizations can deploy CIS Hardened Images directly within the AWS ESC using familiar provisioning tools and workflows. The images serve as foundational building blocks that help teams start secure and remain aligned to best practices as environments scale.
Whether supporting public sector missions, regulated industries, or enterprise workloads, CIS Hardened Images provide a practical way to embed security into cloud infrastructure from the beginning.
CIS Hardened Images for the AWS ESC are only available for purchase and through the AWS ESC Console account.
