The dead live longer: EU cloud providers back Gaia-X

The large-scale European IT project Gaia-X, which has already been repeatedly declared dead, is getting a boost: the CISPE association of European cloud providers pledged on Friday to make around 3,000 European infrastructure services available in the computer clouds by November that meet the Gaia-X requirements. This involves adhering to a European value system with specifications for openness, decentralization, interoperability and trustworthiness in particular. These requirements are set out in a special framework and specifications that the service providers involved are expected to follow.

"Gaia-X has been instrumental in developing a trust framework that supports open collaboration, security, privacy and digital sovereignty in the European cloud ecosystem", explains CISPE. In order to "fully exploit the power of these values and accelerate the adoption of scalable, distributed cloud solutions", these guidelines "must now be actively implemented". The consortium has been working for years to incorporate such principles into regular operations. To this end, it has developed its own practical tools and frameworks that enable cloud providers to reliably ensure compliance with complex regulations. The cooperation with Gaia-X is now a further step in this direction.

In addition to Aitire, Arbua, Leaseweb, Oxya, UpCloud and Serverplan, CISPE members also include US market leader AWS and Microsoft. However, the latter are only considered associate signatories of the association's statutes and therefore have no voting rights. In principle, however, the new initiative is open to all cloud service providers – and not just CISPE members. Any such service provider can submit their own products for inclusion in the corresponding catalog, it says. Services that meet the Gaia-X requirements are listed in the catalog and automatically receive the corresponding Gaia-X labels. This increases "their visibility and credibility on the European market"

Fulfilling the Gaia-X promise

By actively referencing these Gaia-X-compliant services in the CISPE directory, the association aims to "optimize procurement processes and make it easier and faster for customers to identify trustworthy cloud services and integrate them into their environments". In partnership with Gaia-X, the French data room expert Cloud Data Engine has been commissioned to operate the catalog and integrate service providers.

To join the initiative, companies must identify at least one cloud service that complies with at least one of the relevant standards. These include the ten principles for fair software licensing, the code of conduct for data protection, and the portability framework from CISPE itself. They also include the C5 criteria catalog for cloud computing, the pact for climate-neutral data centers, the EU code of conduct for cloud services, and SecNumCloud.

CISPE is convinced "that this hands-on project with defined outcomes is essential to deliver on the promise and value of Gaia-X". Promoting the provision of verifiable credentials and their accessibility is an important basis for more transparency, trust and compliance in the European cloud landscape.

Hyperscaler and Palantir on board

Gaia-X originates from a Franco-German initiative that wanted to establish gold standards for reliable and trustworthy services in the computer clouds. Together with Atos, BMW, Bosch, De-Cix, Deutsche Telekom, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Orange, OVH, SAP and Siemens, CISPE is one of the founding members of this prestigious project for Europe's digital sovereignty. Shadows fell on these ambitions when it became known that US and Chinese hyperscalers such as Amazon, Alibaba, Google and Microsoft as well as the big data company Palantir. Palantir cooperates closely with US intelligence services, were also involved from the outset.

For months, Gaia-X CEO Ulrich Ahle has been trying to defend the initiative for digital ecosystems against harsh criticism, including from within its own ranks. In spring, the Federal Ministry of Economics highlighted the success of numerous funding projects. One Gaia-X spin-off is the 8ra association, which is working on an open source ecosystem for data rooms.

(spo)