The cloud and strategic autonomy
BarcelonaCurrently, the European Union (EU) is moving towards so-called strategic autonomy, which means doing everything possible to be less dependent on third parties, especially the United States and China. The club of twenty-seven is promoting this in all areas. The COVID pandemic taught us that leaving the production of items ranging from masks to hand sanitizers to prevent infections in the hands of other countries or trading blocs poses a very high risk, both for access to products and for the prices that must be paid in cases of urgent need. Geopolitical crises also cause disruptions in supply chains when there is a high dependence on materials and products from certain countries. Europe has been able to verify this with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
In the world of technology, from chips to the cloud, access to programs, the storage of data and information via the internet... this subordination has also occurred, which has been generated over years, to technological giants, especially from the United States, through subsidiaries of Amazon and Microsoft, for example. In fact, these large conglomerates hold data and all sorts of sensitive information of citizens and administrations in their hands. Currently, 80% of the Generalitat's services are hosted in a private cloud.
In this context, Salvador Illa's government has opted to create its own cloud to increase sovereignty over the data it uses, within the framework of the Generalitat de Catalunya's Technological Autonomy Strategy (Estratec). The Catalan executive assures that the sovereign public cloud model it proposes is "pioneering" in the EU for its level of compliance with digital sovereignty standards. It will be, it adds, the first with its characteristics to certify the SEAL 3 level of the European cloud sovereignty framework; that is, it will be capable of guaranteeing that all data hosted therein will be under the control of European regulations.
The Generalitat has opened the tender for the contract, which has an approximate value of around 481 million euros during the first eight years, although the objective is to "maintain it once this period has passed". Once the sovereign public cloud is operational, 40% of the administration's data will be hosted there, corresponding to public services that can be considered sensitive, such as health or security. 30% will remain in a private cloud, and the other 30% will operate from a public cloud to "take advantage of its innovation and scalability capacity", according to the plan designed by the Presidency department led by counselor Albert Dalmau.
The new sovereign public cloud must be located in Catalonia, and will be connected to the rest of the country's infrastructures to "guarantee information protection, service traceability, and compliance exceeding applicable regulatory requirements". This initiative, along with the artificial intelligence (AI) gigafactory that Catalonia is opting for, configures a model of digital autonomy and technological competitiveness that aims to guarantee data sovereignty and control by reducing the dominance of the private sector, especially multinational corporations from powers that compete with the EU.