- German-French exchange: Ministers for Economic Affairs in live talk
- Concretisation of the GAIA-X implementation strategy
On 4 June 2020, Peter Altmaier, German Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, and Bruno Le Maire, French Minister of Economics and Finance, discussed the GAIA-X venture. Andreas Weiss, Director of EuroCloud Germany, participated in the subsequent Virtual Expert Forum. “GAIA-X is the shared opportunity for providers and users of cloud services in Europe”, says Weiss. “EuroCloud Germany is working on the distributed European data infrastructure and is committed to the interests of the digital economy, cloud service providers, small and medium-sized enterprises and hyperscalers.” GAIA-X builds federated digital infrastructure and data services for digital value creation in Europe. Edge and interconnection services are also to be included in the architecture.
GAIA-X as a cloud-native solution: Scalable, agile and data secure
GAIA-X also offers a solution for cloud-native projects that can be designed without reference to traditional legacy systems. This should make cloud services possible, which are not only competitively agile and scalable, but also score points with data protection and security aligned with European framework conditions. The new EuroCloud Germany member Google Cloud, for example, is active in this regard. “Cloud-native – that also describes our company very well. As a member of EuroCloud Germany, Google Cloud is therefore happy to support these and other initiatives for digital transformation – and also GAIA-X as a European project with international aspirations”, says Annette Maier, Managing Director Google Cloud DACH.
Providers and customers plan to have developed a first GAIA-X MVP (Minimal Viable Product) by early 2021. “A comprehensive collective effort is needed here that enables everyone to participate equally”, says Weiss. “This is especially true for other countries in addition to the current initiators from Germany and France.”
The GAIA-X project
The idea for GAIA-X was first presented to the public at the Digital Summit in October 2019. Since then, several hundred experts have been working on the comprehensive European data ecosystem. Thus, an initial technical architecture has been developed based on concrete application examples from various branches of industry and the public sector, on which data can be made widely accessible and exchanged in a trustworthy manner. All publications can be found at www.data-infrastructure.eu.
