On Wednesday, Amazon launched an independent cloud for Europe aimed at highly-regulated industries and the government.

The European Sovereign Cloud operated by Amazon Web Services will be located in Europe and will be separate from the company’s other cloud services.

As part of the new system, customers will have the option of keeping certain data within the European Union, and the operation and support will be handled only by AWS employees based in the 27-nation bloc.

Amazon said in a statement: “Customers will have control and assurance that AWS won’t access or use their data without their agreement as well as access to the strongest sovereignty controls among leading cloud providers.”

As Europe’s data privacy rules become more strict, businesses are under increasing pressure to adopt so-called “digital sovereignty,” the idea the EU should have control over its own technology and data.

Despite not being well defined, digital sovereignty relates broadly to the EU’s efforts to boost European-developed critical technology and have strict data-storage and transfer rules.

Government agencies and critical businesses are increasingly moving their operations to public cloud operators such as Amazon or Microsoft, creating concern in the EU that data is being stored on non-European servers. It may be necessary to transfer data to and from the EU in order to use some cloud features. This data may be accessed by entities outside of the EU, which is causing concern among businesses and lawmakers.

Max Peterson, vice president of Sovereign Cloud at AWS, said that the European Sovereign Cloud reinforces the company’s commitment to providing its customers with the most advanced sovereignty controls, privacy safeguards, and security features available on the cloud.