GAIA-X Has Potential, Risks Losing Relevance

GAIA-X, an ongoing attempt to establish common requirements for a European data infrastructure, has a “great opportunity to improve open standards, improve market transparency and build a valuable market for data, cloud and federated security and IT services,” according to Paul McKay, speaking during a session at the Forrester Technology & Innovation Global 2020 virtual event.

McKay began by outlining why the GAIA-X project has become necessary. This is fundamentally due to the dominance of US and Chinese providers in the European public cloud market, with over 75% of public cloud networks currently processed by non-European providers. Recent legislation in these countries (the US CLOUD Act 2018 and Chinese Cybersecurity Law 2017) allow national security authorities access to certain data even when it is hosted outside of that jurisdiction and by an entity not connected to it.

“This has meant European businesses have again started becoming nervous about a lack of a sizeable European cloud provider that can make certain guarantees about data sovereignty, where data is actually stored and give transparency over data movements,” he explained.

This has led to the introduction of GAIA-X by the French and German governments in 2019, which has subsequently been put on a more formal footing this year. In addition, last month the GAIA-X Foundation was set up in Belgium with the purpose of developing a services market place in which it will “certify prospective suppliers of those services against common security requirements.” This will be underpinned by current privacy and cybersecurity legislation such as the GDPR and European Cybersecurity Act.

McKay explained that GAIA-X has been set up to allow providers to operate across one or more of a number of layers, inclu ..

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