Brussels, February 21, 2022 – Gaia-X, a project championing data sovereignty, has been at the forefront of digital transformation in Europe and beyond through its lighthouse projects that concretely aim to create a data exchange platform built on transparency, trust, and openness.
Most recently, European cloud providers have launched Structura-X, fully meeting Gaia-X requirements. 28 companies and organisations have agreed to make their cloud services Gaia-X compliant.
Structura-X complements the previous, industry-specific lighthouse initiatives for the automotive sector, Catena-X, agriculture, AgriGaia and finance, EuroDat. Initial certified offerings are expected to be ready by the middle of this year. The latest lighthouse project release is available here.
Francesco Bonfiglio, CEO of Gaia-X. “Structura-X marks an important milestone in the evolution of Gaia-X, aiming to realise the first example of Federation of Infrastructures. We want to create value and competitive advantage out of our typical fragmentation in Europe, through the power of federation. We welcome the objective of Structura-X to build the ‘bottom part of our X’ – an infrastructure ecosystem – to run the ‘top part of our X’ – the data spaces ecosystem”, realized through the other Lighthouse Projects”.
Structura-X emerged on the sidelines of last year’s Gaia-X Summit in Milan in November. In his keynote address, the German Economics Minister Peter Altmaier called upon Gaia-X-compatible infrastructure to be built in Europe alongside industry services. In coordination with the Gaia-X Association, seven European providers initially agreed on the common goal: Atos, Aruba.it, DE-CIX, Deutsche Telekom, Engineering, Noovle and TOP-IX.
In the meantime, additional companies from all over Europe have joined. To date, this adds up to 28 Structura-X members from 10 countries: AssoSoftware, City Network, Cloud&Heat Technologies, CS Group, CSI, EBRC, Elmec, Fabasoft, International Dataspaces, IONOS SE, KPN, Luxinnovation, Mainstream, next layer, OpenNebula Systems, OSISM, ThreeFold Tech, Tietoevry, United Group, Vivacom. The members bring infrastructure services to the table and equally agree to utilise (open-source) technology to make the cloud federation services viable, including interoperability respecting security and privacy-enabling by design.
Max Ahrens, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Gaia-X states “We very much welcome the initiative of the infrastructure providers and continues – The industrial implementation of the Gaia-X standards by cloud and infrastructure providers is an essential building block for functioning data sovereignty in Europe.”
CSPs invited to join
Structura-X invites more cloud service providers (CSP) to join. The common goal is to shape their existing infrastructure services into an eco-system for European data sovereignty. An overarching European cloud infrastructure is being created. Users will be able to test and deploy their services and data rooms in a Gaia-X-approved infrastructure.
Structura-X will enable the necessary scale for new cross-sector and cross-country collaboration in the cloud, helping to decrease the previous fragmentation of the European cloud market.
The Initiative will work closely with Gaia-X, and other lighthouse projects to define the technical framework for data sovereignty. Meanwhile, Gaia-X will collaborate with the lighthouse partners and coordinators through their common project teams through their lab in a joint Program scaling. The respective working groups will adapt the Gaia-X framework, including technical specifications, labels, and open-source software implementation to support the ongoing scaling of the lighthouse projects that share the common theme of creating a resilient, data-driven, and sustainable ecosystem.
Additional members are invited to join and follow suit.
