The development of GAIA-X, the European cloud infrastructure, reached a milestone on Thursday. Deutsche Telekom and 21 other companies and organizations from France and Germany have come together to form an umbrella organization. The non-commercial GAIA-X Foundation will drive the creation of a federal and decentralized digital ecosystem for Europe. The aim is to ensure digital sovereignty, data availability, interoperability, portability, transparency and fair participation in Europe.
“We as Deutsche Telekom are proud to be part of the GAIA-X entity. In close cooperation with our partners we want to build a European data ecosystem and so ensure European data sovereignty,” said Claudia Nemat, member of the board of management of Deutsche Telekom. “Now we quickly need a legal framework with clear rules for data exchange. In addition, the public sector should enforce the usage of federated GAIA-X compliant cloud ecosystem.”
The GAIA-X Foundation is set up in such a way that it steers and facilitates work and cooperation within the GAIA-X community. It will develop a common set of policy rules to ensure that the objectives as they are defined within the GAIA-X project so far are in line with the European Data Strategy. It will work closely with other initiatives to define an “Architecture of Standards” to integrate their work and to provide interoperability and portability of infrastructure, data and applications.