The roadmap of the GAIA-X Foundation

© GAIA-X Foundation

The fast and efficient analysis of data is the driver of modern technologies and efficient processes. Protecting it from unauthorized access is crucial for the competitiveness of companies throughout the European economic area.
The key question here is: Who owns the data? Data sovereignty is becoming a critical success factor. The aim of GAIA-X is therefore to establish a European data infrastructure for the secure digitalization and networking of industry, finance and healthcare.

On 4 June, the group of supporters from politics, research and industry presented the next stage of GAIA-X under the patronage of the German and French ministries of economics: an international non-profit organization based in Brussels. In future, this GAIA-X Foundation will act as a Europe-wide GAIA-X network organization to promote solutions to these challenges faced by European companies. The aim is to create many small, geographically distributed edge data centers with an open cloud connection that will enable a new class of industrial applications. Ultimately, one of the major goals of the GAIA-X project is to break up the rigid structures in the cloud market and restore the digital sovereignty of users and trust in digital infrastructures in Germany and Europe. The aim is to offer the possibility of orchestrating cloud applications across providers and thus combining the different features of the providers individually and appropriately. The end result should be an efficient, high-performance multi-provider system that is transparent and verifiable.

A first demonstrator

The demonstrator with a simulated use case in which a user selects services as he wishes.

© Cloud & Heat

Also on June 4, the company Cloud&Heat presented the first GAIA-X demonstrator. The demonstrator shows the vision and principles of the project in basic steps. Users must be able to choose between different cloud providers and use their data and applications freely between the different providers and combine different services.

In the selected demonstrator, the customer - in the example shown here, the big data company AI4BD - formulates its criteria in areas such as data security and data protection or environmental sustainability via the GAIA-X portal of the German Edge Cloud and selects its preferred provider. The request is then distributed via the intelligent orchestration software Krake from Cloud&Heat and the service is started. The hyperscaler Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides the requested data in encrypted form to the security-hardened cloud environment of a local provider, where the data is decrypted and processed using a machine learning algorithm. This is where the expertise of Secunet Security Networks, Secustack, a joint venture between Cloud&Heat and Secunet, and NTT Data Deutschland comes into play. The data is then passed on to the user. The user thus combines the strengths of different providers in order to be able to implement an AI service on an infrastructure that meets their expectations in terms of performance and security. Deutsche Telekom is supporting the development of the demonstrator as one of the coordinators.

The next goal is to expand the demonstrator to include additional use cases and to add additional functions, particularly in the area of identity management.