Some cloud providers think labelling cloud services as EU-made will help the bloc's industry. But the former CEO of Gaia-X, one of the EU's flagship cloud programs, says labels are only part of the solution; “Enforcing Gaia-X labels will not save Europe," Francesco Bonfiglio told Euractiv.
Gaia-X is a politically-led initiative which originally aimed to develop an EU federated data and cloud ecosystem. The project met limited success in actually getting such an ecosystem up and running. The market share of EU cloud providers in the bloc has continued to shrink since Gaia-X was founded.
Instead, the project has pivoted to create standards, specifications, and labels needed for cloud providers in Europe to be interoperable and trustworthy.
Providers that fulfill certain criteria can get a Gaia-X label; "a mark of confidence which reflects the completion of different criteria related to transparency, data protection, security, interoperability, portability, sustainability, and European Control," says their website.
Some firms are jumping on the bandwagon.
French electricity provider EDF and European airplane maker Airbus already committed to including Gaia-X labels into their next cloud calls for tenders.
Lobby organisation CISPE, which includes mostly European cloud service providers and US hyperscaler Amazon, advocated that Gaia-X association and its members follow EDF and Airbus's examples last Thursday.
For CISPE, "customer demand" will drive Gaia-X long-term relevance.
French OVHcloud shared a similar view, calling on cloud consumers to adapt Gaia-X labels.
These labels "are necessary," but the EU "needs to enable the creation of a concrete federation of cloud service providers based on a new business model that can compete against US hyperscalers,” Bonfiglio said.
Labels will not be accepted as a protectionist “mechanism by the open market, nor [will they] compensate for the lack of capacity and spread of portfolio that make EU providers weaker," he stated.
If the EU is to become a champion of the data economy, it needs to "gain control of the hosting and of the processing of data through its own cloud computing," Secretary-General of the European DIGITAL SME Alliance Sebastiano Toffaletti told Euractiv.
"It is too late for the EU to [...] develop systematic challengers to the major US cloud providers," wrote Former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi in his September report on the single market.
Draghi advised Europeans to develop sovereign cloud solutions, for reasons of strategic autonomy.
