City Network, a leading global supplier of cloud services based on OpenStack, today announced that the company have joined the GAIA-X project. The goal of the European project is to create a proposal for the next generation data infrastructure for the region: a secure, federated system that meets the highest standards of digital sovereignty while promoting innovation. As an EU project, it is initiated and lead by politicians, businesses and scientists in Germany and France as well as more than 300 contributing organizations from all over Europe.
– During the past 10-15 years, Sweden and the rest of EU have slowly but surely become utterly dependant on a few companies outside of the region to manage our data infrastructure. Not only does this inhibit the sovereignty of the world’s largest economy, it also places our most valuable asset, our data, outside of our jurisdiction. This is not a reasonable, sustainable or acceptable development for the 446 million people who live here. Europe needs to be able to innovate on its own digital infrastructure, based on European values and laws. As an avid advocate for lawful and compliant information processing, I am very happy that City Network now participates in the important GAIA-X project, said Johan Christenson, CEO and founder of City Network.
As a provider of highly regulatory and compliant cloud services as well as public and private cloud infrastructure based on the open platform OpenStack, City Network will actively participate and contribute to the GAIA-X project. Specifically, the company will engage in two out of three project areas; the regulatory project as well as the technical project.
GAIA-X is an open project and under development where one part is to certify infrastructure providers in order to make clear that they adhere to the standards of the project. As part of its engagement in the project, City Network will work to fulfil this certification and thus become a certified GAIA-X provider.
– On June 4th the partners of the project GAIA-X published various documents presenting first concepts and results. On this basis a next phase was kicked off envisaging a broad based European process to continue to develop the project. GAIA-X will be synchronised with the European strategy on data and connect with other related initiatives. It will implement European values, policy rules and standards efficiently. We welcome City Network to the GAIA-X family and their contribution to the GAIA-X process, said Ernst Stoeckl-Pukall, German Federal Ministry for Economics and Energy.
To find out more about the project, please visit: https://www.data-infrastructure.eu/GAIAX/Navigation/EN/Home/home.html