Europe will develop its own cloud infrastructure - not everyone believes that this is a good idea

German and French politicians propose creating a local cloud for storing data of EU citizens in order to weaken the position of American providers in the European market. We discuss the views of representatives of the IT industry, human rights organizations and ordinary users of the cloud.

Photos – Markus Spiske – Unsplash

What is the essence of the project

Large Western and Chinese IaaS providers are actively strengthening their position in the European market. For example, Alibaba will soon push Google out of third place on the list of the largest cloud vendors. This was partly possible due to the expansion of the customer base and the construction of new data centers in Europe.

The governments of Germany and France are concerned that local cloud providers are not able to compete with foreign IT giants. Therefore, politicians have proposed the implementation of the Gaia-X project, in which to strengthen the IT infrastructure of the European Union. In particular, we are talking about creating a cloud-based storage network for data generated by the Internet of things, supercomputers and quantum machines. EU citizens will not be forced to use the local infrastructure – they will still be able to work with the services of foreign providers.

Who supported the idea

Telecommunications companies and manufacturers of IT equipment – Deutsche Telekom, Siemens and Bosch spoke in support of the German-French plan. They even took part in the elaboration of the bill. Tim Hoettges, Executive Director of Deutsche Telekom, noted that Gaia-X will firstly increase the security of personal data of EU citizens, as all information will be stored in the region.

Supported the initiative and a number of large banks, in particular, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank. They stated their readiness to switch to European infrastructure, but only if the platform is competitive in terms of performance and prices. In turn, Oliver Süme, chairman of the German Internet association Eco, also noted that the new cloud ecosystem will strengthen the position of local IaaS providers and help them improve services.

Project criticism

Amazon and Microsoft were among the first to oppose the government initiative. So far, EU users will be able to continue working with foreign IaaS providers, but this can change. In the future, a number of countries may limit the activities of American companies, and this will negatively affect the quality of services provided to European customers.

Photos – ev – Unsplash

Residents of Hacker News also note that in Europe there are already providers that can compete with foreign corporations, but they lack functionality.
Therefore, it is better to direct the funds not toward the construction of a new IT infrastructure for a local data warehouse, but towards the development of application services in the cloud.

There is still an opinion that with Gaia-X Europe will have a repeat of history with similar projects. For example, in 2012, the French government spent $ 200 million to develop a state cloud. For these purposes, two IaaS providers were founded: Numergy and Cloudwatt. However, they were not able to attract a sufficient number of customers. The organization had to sell telecommunications providers SFR and Orange, respectively.

There are also those who took a neutral-expectant position on this issue. According to Diego Naranjo, representative of European Digital Rights (EDRi), the organization’s attitude towards the Gaia-X project will depend on implementation approaches. If in the end there appears one large corporation managing the cloud infrastructure, then this will not lead to anything good.

In any case, the project is still under discussion and may significantly change. But exactly how – this question remains open.

You can find more about IaaS on our corporate blog. In it, we write about data protection, the architecture of cloud providers and virtualization.