The EU Telecommunications Ministers welcomed the results of their informal videoconference, emphasising the political support of 25 Member States for a European cloud computing alliance.
Away from the cameras, however, they discussed highly sensitive projects under study by the European Commission, such as data economics or artificial intelligence (see EUROPE 12581/12).
Towards a federation of cloud infrastructure
Proposed by the European Commission, the declaration on the cloud has been co-signed by 25 Member States, while the two absent Member States (Denmark and Cyprus) intend to join it, Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton said at a press conference.
Entitled “Building the next generation cloud for businesses and the public sector in the EU”, it commits the co-signatories to work together to deploy resilient and competitive infrastructures and services across Europe.
Three priority areas for action have been identified: – combining private, national and European investments, notably by launching at the end of the year a European Alliance on Industrial Data and the Cloud; – defining a common European approach to cloud capabilities; – and promoting the adoption of more secure, interoperable and energy-efficient cloud data centres and services.
Coming soon: an act on data governance
At a press conference, Mr Breton also outlined the future act on data governance, scheduled for 11 November.
He mentioned three actions: – define the conditions for re-using so-called sensitive public sector data (public hospitals, energy, transport, etc.); – provide a framework for the emergence of new data platforms, knowing that “the wave of industrial data is ahead of us”; – establish conditions for the collection of data for public purposes.
This regulation, the Commissioner continued, will be supplemented by a Data Act “to clarify the context of data use between two companies (B2B) or between a company and a government (B2G)”.
See the statement: https://bit.ly/354vQ6n (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)