Advancing European cloud offers is essential to increase the competitiveness of European businesses and provide European citizens, as well as public administrations and companies everywhere, with greater choice regarding the trustworthy data processing infrastructure and services that they need to develop future data-driven innovation and emerging technologies, such as 5G/6G and artificial intelligence.
Thierry Breton, Commissioner for the Internal Market, said:
Europe needs to join forces to lead on the current and upcoming wave of industrial and public data. This declaration is promising and shows the depth of the change that we witness. There is a common understanding that it is vital that any data can be stored and processed in Europe, according to European rules and standards. That will be a key pillar of our digital sovereignty for this Digital Decade and will propel Europe's recovery, ensure long-term competitiveness and help us reach climate sustainability.
To pool forces and lead the cloud uptake in the private and public sectors across Europe, Member States agreed that their joint actions will focus on: combining private, national and EU investment efforts in deploying resilient and secure cloud infrastructures and services and supporting the development of a competitive European cloud supply industry and Europe as a global data hub; defining a common European approach on federating cloud capacities, by working towards one set of joint technical solutions and policy norms in order to foster pan-European interoperable EU cloud services; leading the shift towards more secure, interoperable and energy-efficient data centres and cloud services in particular for small and medium enterprises, start-ups and the public sector.
The Commission, together with Member States, aims to create more synergies between national and cross-border initiatives to enhance and broaden their interoperability, scale-up and scope. To this aim, the next step will be the launch of a European Alliance on Industrial Data and Cloud, as announced in the European Data strategy of February 2020. Interested Member States, industries and experts will work together to design the detailed business, investment and implementation plans to deploy the next generation cloud.