100+ European CIOs in GAIA-X webinar

GAIA-X is entering a new phase: that of opening its membership beyond the founding members. The webinar aimed at providing knowledge and understanding as to what GAIA-X is and what it can be used for by organizations using digital services, apart from its political display of a European Trusted Cloud.

Warm welcome
Joachim J. Reichel, board member of VOICE opened the webinar by acknowledging the value of the cooperation between the four CIO associations to carry the voice of the users both in this webinar but also in eg. our joint efforts towards the European Commission.

History and goal
Marine de Sury, Mission officer at Cigref, explained the history of the GAIA-X initiative and its goal to create an environment in which data can be shared and stored under the control of data owners and users, and where rules are defined and respected. This, so that data and services can be made easily available, compiled and exchanged. Any company or administration is welcome to join GAIA-X if they meet the requirements of the highest level of data protection, security, transparency and portability/ reversibility, in other words the policy rules.

GAIA-X in a nutshell: Why? What? How?
Peter Kraemer of Acatech, the German National Academy of Science and Engineering, explained that they have been asked to work on the user side of GAIA-X by the German Ministry of Economic Affairs, Industries and Energy. GAIA-X was created roughly 1,5 year ago to create a data infrastructure that follows the core European values: openness and transparency, authenticity and trust, sovereignty and self-determination, user friendliness, modularity and interoperability, free market access and European value creation, data protection. GAIA-X aims at creating a data ecosystem which consists of different data spaces (8 domain lines) derived from the European Data Strategy, connected with different infrastructure ecosystems (cloud services providers, high performance computing etc.). Use cases about what GAIA-X can and could be in the future have been identified and evaluated with their requirements, to build data-space demonstrators.
More information on: www.data-infrastructure.eu

GAIA-X from CIOs perspective: Beckhoff Automation and EDF
Gerd Hoppe, member of the management board of GAIA-X founding member Beckhoff Automation (an industrial automation company), explained how IT meets OT and why they support GAIA-X:  to have a trusted hybrid cloud scenario. His company participates in several demonstrators to promote use cases. Vincent Niebel, CIO of GAIA-X founding member EDF (a worldwide energy company headquartered in France) talked about how GAIA-X embodies the values EDF believes in and the uses cases they developed such as collaboration and AI.

The GAIA-X webinar was a brief but valuable session. We would like to thank all participating speakers for their time and efforts!

The presentations, a videolink and the minutes of the meeting are available to our members via our Knowledge Bank. Requests for more information via bureau@cio-platform.nl .

PS. Since the meeting described above we have received indications that several European suppliers are getting heavily involved in GAIA-X and are starting to set standards. If the demand side organizations want their interests to be taken into consideration, for instance open standards, flexibility etc., it is necessary to get involved in the GAIA-X foundation (AISBL)!