Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud
"Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud – but estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider."
Airbus wants to move its data outside US jurisdiction:
“I need a sovereign cloud because part of the information is extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective,” Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital, told The Register. “We want to ensure this information remains under European control.”
The contract is worth upwards of €50 million, but the company doesn’t necessarily think it’ll actually find a provider. US cloud providers are susceptible to the US CLOUD Act that allows authorities to obtain data held on their infrastructure even if it’s physically located in the EU. EU-only providers, meanwhile, haven’t necessarily hit the scale or sophistication that a customer like Airbus demands.
That creates a really interesting opportunity: Airbus is doubtless not the only large European company with similar needs. There’s a proposal to bankroll the creation of this kind of infrastructure in the EU, with an estimated price of €300 billion. It probably won’t be ready in time for Airbus, but they’ve at least proven that the need is real rather than ideological. Who’s going to pick up the baton?
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