Analyze gaps, accelerate collaborative innovation

Most French clouds currently offer "Infrastructure as a Service" (IAAS) as part of their range of secure & private hosting services. To meet this objective, Cleyrop, ENGIE, OUTSCALE and Teralab, the Institut Mines-Télécom platform, have developed a sovereign Cloud and Data offering that complies with European Gaia-X standards.

To reduce the risks associated with dependence on American or Chinese infrastructures, the market is waiting for a European alternative.

A growing need to exploit data to facilitate strategic decision-making has emerged in both the public and private sectors, coupled with the need to preserve French and European technological sovereignty. In France, it is also part of a reinforcement of the State's doctrine on trusted clouds, with a strong desire to prioritize the use of the cloud for government agencies as much as possible, but also to call on "trusted" solutions benefiting from the SecNumCloud 3.It is in this context that the EDHISI (European data hub, infrastructure and services initiatives) project was launched in 2021, following a successful call for expressions of interest from BPI France, aimed at developing and strengthening the European cloud industry, as part of France 2030. As a reminder, France 2030 is an initiative of the French Presidency aimed at investing 54 billion in local projects to regain strategic industrial and digital autonomy and accelerate the transformation of key sectors of the French economy through innovation.

The collective intelligence of a private-public partnership

The richness of EDHISI lies in its partnership with OUTSCALE, a SecNumCloud 3.2-qualified sovereign cloud infrastructure and "as a service" platform operator, and TeraLab, the Data & Data platform of the Institut Mines-Télécom, as well as the support of industry observers such as the Engie group, which shared its feedback as a major data user.The project was structured around several work packages (computation & storage engines, administration & security, Gaia-X services federation, processing unification, data services operation, etc.), culminating in the creation of an end-to-end trust offering from infrastructures to Data services, and the experimentation of data sharing in compliance with IDSA (International Data Spaces Association) and Gaia-X standards.

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"This project was an opportunity for OUTSCALE to work with a customer who had particularly important security challenges, and who also made it possible to guide, support and test, over fairly short time intervals, iterations around a new encryption key management service with the aim of strengthening the security of our customers' data platforms. OUTSCALE has identified growing security needs among its customers and partners. And we believe that managing our customers' encryption keys is the right solution for their security and compliance challenges" comments Benjamin Laplane, CTO of 3DS Outscale.

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"TeraLab's role in the EDHISI project was to provide the services of its neutral, sovereign experimentation platform to the Cleyrop data hub. This enabled us to set up a data exchange between the two datahubs, in compliance with the data sharing standards published by the International Dataspace Association. Indeed, when we talk about trust in data exchange, we need to specify criteria that are sufficiently reliable to measure it and establish it right through to the cloud service", says Anne-Sophie Taillandier, Data & AI TeraLab Platform Director.

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"EDHISI's objective is to create, with our partners OUTSCALE and TeraLab, a trusted infrastructure, enabling public and private customers to turn to a sovereign solution that respects the norms and standards defined at European level by the GAIA-X initiative, to operate their data projects without being dependent on American players", concludes Arnaud Muller