OVH, founder member of Gaia-X

OHV, member of the European cloud project, Gaia-X

Bruno Le Maire, the French finance minister and his German counterpart announced the launch of Gaia-X at the start of June. France and Germany are joining forces for this large scale IT project. Holding the reigns are 22 European companies including Atos, Bosch, Orange, Safran and even the Roubaix-based OVHcloud. Their mission: create a European alternative to the American and Chinese data infrastructures such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Alibaba. And in doing so, assert the European Union’s digital sovereignty. The operational platform is announced for the beginning of 2021.

“For OVHcloud, supporting the development of Gaia-X is self-evident. Data protection, open standards, reversibility and transparency: these European values are part of OVHcloud’s DNA. They will also be at the heart of Gaia-X.” Michel Paulin, CEO OVHcloud

What is Gaia-X?

The aim of the project is to “build a reliable and secure data infrastructure for Europe.” Specifically, the tool designed will take the form of a unique platform which brings together European services:

• Hosting
• Storage
• Data management

It will allow these different infrastructures to be connected together. The only obligation to gain access is to respect certain European security criteria and standards based on 4 main principles:

• transparency
• reversibility
• openness
• sovereignty