EuroStack

Europe’s quest for digital sovereignty is hampered by a 90 per cent dependency on US cloud infrastructure, claims Cristina Caffarra, a competition expert and a driving force behind the Eurostack initiative.

While Brussels champions policy initiatives and American tech giants market their own ‘sovereign’ solutions, a handful of public authorities in Austria, Germany, and France, alongside the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT.

Infosec In Brief Switzerland’s Conference of Data Protection Officers, Privatim, last week issued a resolution calling on Swiss public bodies to avoid using hyperscale clouds and SaaS services due to security concerns.

“Most SaaS solutions do not yet offer true end-to-end encryption that would prevent the provider from accessing plaintext data,” the resolution states. Privatim therefore thinks SaaS or hyperscale clouds – especially those subject to the US CLOUD Act – are not appropriate places for Swiss government agencies to place “particularly sensitive personal data or data subject to a legal obligation of confidentiality.”

Europe is at a crossroads. The Summit on European Digital Sovereignty marks an important milestone for the EU and its member states in aligning on a shared strategy for achieving real and lasting European digital sovereignty. As the EU pursues the goal of digital sovereignty, we urge you to harness open source — that is, technology that is free to use, inspect, adapt, and share — as a key enabler of this strategy.