Gaia-X is a European initiative aiming at developping common requirements for a European data infrastructure.
Gaia-X has been driven by European cloud providers, such as Atos, Orange, Amadeus, OVHCloud (among others), and results from the alignment of politics & business partners across Europe, in continuous exchange with the European Commission.
France and Germany together, alongside with other European countries, played a key role in the achievement of this key milestone to reach the upper level in terms of European digital autonomity.
The objective is to create a proposal for the next generation of a data infrastructure for Europe: a secure, federated system that meets the highest standards of digital sovereignty while promoting innovation. Gaia-X relies on Federated Services that ensure highest security requirements and privacy protection. The Federated Services focus on:
the implementation of secure federated identity and trust mechanisms (security and privacy by design);
sovereign data services which ensure the identity of source and receiver of data and which ensure the access and usage rights towards the data;
easy access to the available providers, nodes and services. Data will be provided through federated catalogues;
the integration of existing standards to ensure interoperability and portability across infrastructure, applications and data;
the establishment of a compliance framework and Certification and Accreditation services; and
the contribution of a modular compilation of open source software and standards to support providers in delivering a secure, federated and interoperable infrastructure.
The initial set of federation services will be expanded. The roadmap is aligned with the development of ecosystem participants’ requirements.
More than 300 organizations from various countries are already involved in GAIA-X.
Atos'CEO Elie Girard states that "The Gaia-X approach which helps facilitate infrastructure portability as well as application and data portability is, we believe, the appropriate move to benefit from hyperscaler offerings in Europe, while respecting a set of reasonable but necessary policies consistent with European values and aspirations.I am very positive about the approach because it is unprecedented, driven by industrials, and fully collaborative."
Source: https://www.data-infrastructure.eu/GAIAX/Navigation/EN/Home/home.html