As in France and Europe, the branch for a European cloud software is growing
The point on the cloud in Europe. The in-depth study by Enrico Martial
If in May 2021 the European Cloud seemed to have many ideas and a good future, in the following months some stumbles and misunderstandings emerged. A recent sign of this is the initiative of Philippe Latombe, a French deputy of the MoDem, who asked himself, in a written question to the Minister of Economy Bruno Le Maire, how the French railways SNCF do to switch to the American cloud Amazon AWS or Orange , the former telephone monopolist, to resell it to its customers, while the French state and Europe speak of digital sovereignty. Latombe is also rapporteur of a report of the National Assembly of 29 June on “ Building and promoting a national and European digital sovereignty ” which expresses a clearer position on European autonomy in digital matters than that which has emerged so far.
INDEPENDENT NOT ONLY ON SERVERS, BUT ALSO ON CLOUD SOFTWARE
The MEP argued that hosting servers on European territory is not enough to protect data. Even the software and technology cannot be Chinese or overseas if you really want to escape the perimeter of China's National Intelligence Law or the US Cloud Act and Foregn Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). With those regulations, Washington can have access to sensitive data (economic, industrial, security) even outside its own territory. Europe had responded with a Judgment of the Court of Justice (Scherms2 of 2020) and with the current attempt at a "European sovereignty" over data and the cloud, on which the debate seems rather open.
THE SERVER MODEL IN EUROPE WITH BIG TECH SOFTWARE, BUT UNDER CONTROL
In the observation of the European competitive weakness on software, the solution identified was mixed: the clouds in Europe will be subjected to laws and procedures of legal security, the software will be developed by the large global companies, Amazon, Microsoft, Google.
Bruno Le Maire, the French Minister of Economy, presented this model on May 17, 2021 under the label of “Cloud of trust” . The Franco-German partnership with the name of Gaia-X had also developed in its application, with 22 founding subjects, then extended to other countries, over 300 and towards 500 members. It is also mixed, because there are the big global companies, from Alibaba to Amazon AWS to Google, although they cannot access the board of directors. The trusted Cloud already has concrete applications in France (as well as in Germany), as in the agreement announced on 9 October between Thales and Google , which want to offer the service with these data protection standards starting from 2023.
GERMANY, FRANCE AND ITALY ALIGNED, WHO FIRST, WHO LATER
Although in Italy there is no clear perception of it, Germany, France and Italy are well aligned on the model of the sovereign European cloud (of trust, hybrid, sovereign, autonomous, independent: there are many adjectives). It can be read both in official documents, as during the German presidency of the Union in 2020 , or in the path of GAIA-X, but also in facts.
Germany committed itself first of all, by imposing a Microsoft "Germany" Cloud as early as 2015 , in which the T-System branch of Deutsche Telekom had control of the servers that were placed in the country, and Microsoft could only access data on with his authorization and under his supervision. In 2021 with a Cloud PA project with servers in Germany and in partnership with Google, T-System will encrypt customer data and check the updates that Google will propose, and before their installation.
In Italy, the Cloud PA in which the Tim-Cdp-Leonardo-Sogei project has prevailed at the moment will have to respect the principles of the national Cloud Strategy , which in addition to owning the servers in Europe (there will be 4, two in northern Italy and two in the center ) provides, in analogy to Germany, for example the cryptography of data with keys in Italy.
Technology suppliers (CSPs, including Big Tech) will be subjected to "qualification" by our Digital Agency (Agid), as is similarly done in France with the NumSecCloud of the French Digital Security Agency (Anssi) or in Germany. with the C5 catalog of the Federal Office for Information Technology Security (BSI), albeit with some variations. Indeed, a common European, or at least Franco-German, qualification process is also being studied.
SHOULD THE CLOUD SOFTWARE BE EUROPEAN?
In recent weeks, however, there has been a critique of the “mixed” model made up of European servers and Big Tech software, albeit “qualified”. The sponsorship of the Chinese Huawei at the GAIA-X assembly in Milan on November 18 provoked protests , as well as the composition of the new management, in which industrial components prevail (i.e. cloud customers, who tend to prefer the best and most classic , that is Google, Amazon, Microsoft) more than the European cloud providers, which should grow, as noted by Yann Lechelle, the administrator of Scaleway in interviews and in one of his blogs. The company, a branch of Iliad, present in France, Italy and Poland with telephone companies, and controlled by Xavier Niel (who looks at TIM) had in fact abandoned, muttering the GAIA-X project on 18 November.
Compared to the idea of a mixed "cloud of trust", there is a wish for a "European sovereignty" also over software, with greater involvement of cloud operators and European software houses, which already work on their behalf, especially on Linux and on technologies developed in-house, such as for example in the OVHcloud-Soprasteria and OVHcloud-Capgemini arguments.
In France, Tariq Krim, founder of Netvibes and Polite.one, is also promoting European cloud software. In his report Latombe proposed exceptions to the competition rules for software, given that "China and the United States do not respect them". Some members of GAIA-X had also pointed out that there is a risk of protectionism, and of being left behind, if you do not have the skills of large companies.
PERHAPS THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION IS ALSO IN IT
The criticism of Scaleway, Tarik Krim and the deputy Latombe of the mixed model does not seem confined to France alone. The European Commission itself has developed its own initiative, with a complementary dimension to GAIA-X but potentially competing, if it pushes the pedal towards greater Europeanization also of software and technologies.
After an invitation to join a " European Aliance for Industrial Data, Edge and Cloud ", on December 14th the Commissioner for the internal market Thierry Breton presented the initiative together with the 39 companies that have joined, including Scaleway exiting from GAIA-X but also others that remain present, such as TIM, Orange, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, OVHcloud, Aruba, Siemens, Daussault, Airbus, Ericsson, SAP, Capgemini and many more. Important actors in a theme in great movement, which will return to the spotlight during the French presidency of the Union, in the next semester , in which there are regulations in preparation on digital, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA ).
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/come-in-francia-e-in-europa-cresce-la-fronda-per-un-software-cloud-europeo/ on Thu, 30 Dec 2021 06:59:45 +0000.