Additional companies from all over Europe joined the Lighthouse Structura-X project, make the initial group (Atos, Aruba.it, DE-CIX, Deutsche Telekom, Engineering, Noovle and TOP-IX) grow to 28 members from 10 countries (AssoSoftware, City Network, Cloud&Heat Technologies, CS Group, CSI, EBRC, Elmec, Fabasoft, International Dataspaces, IONOS SE, KPN, Luxinnovation, Mainstream, next layer, OpenNebula Systems, OSISM, ThreeFold Tech, Tietoevry, United Group, Vivacom).
The initiative emerged on the sidelines of the recent Gaia-X Summit in Milan in November. “We very much welcome the initiative of the infrastructure providers,” said Max Ahrens, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Gaia-X. “The industrial implementation of the Gaia-X standards by cloud and infrastructure providers is an essential building block for functioning data sovereignty in Europe.”
Structura-X invites more cloud service providers (CSP) to join. The common goal is to shape their existing infrastructure services into an eco-system for European data sovereignty. An overarching European cloud infrastructure is being created. Users will be able to test and deploy their services and data rooms in a Gaia-X-approved infrastructure.
Structura-X will work closely with Gaia-X AISBL, which among other things defines the technical framework for data sovereignty. At the same time, Structura-X will enable the necessary scale for new cross-sector and cross-country collaboration in the cloud. The previous fragmentation of the European cloud market will thus be overcome.