On 5 March, a new interoperability standard for cloud infrastructure management emerged from the collaboration between two major European providers, Ionos and Aruba, together with Dynamo, a European DIGITAL SME Alliance’s Innovators Club member.

The initiative, presented in Milan at the Dynamo Cloud Business Forum, lays the foundation for greater interoperability and security, paving the way for the creation of EuroStack—an independent European tech infrastructure compliant with EU laws.

The new standard – SECA, Sovereign European Cloud API – ensures greater independence, flexibility, and interoperability for European businesses and public authorities, as to prevent vendor lock-in effect in cloud services.

Ionos and Aruba will thus continue offering cloud services as independent providers, but they will seemingly use each other’s data centres to scale up their capacity and geographical outreach when needed.  As announced by Dynamo, SECA will be a free and open source project with the participation of all European actors in the value chain, at either infrastructure, product or service level. So, the company aims to create fairer and more competitive market conditions while reducing users’ dependence on non-EU cloud providers.

With SECA, European cloud providers have a viable solution to step up the quality and offering of their services. The European cloud market has experienced strong growth, with an annual 20% increase projected until 2030. However, the excessive fragmentation of the EU industry remains a significant challenge in the competition with global tech giants.

Without proper regulatory pressure, as well as increased visibility and accessibility of European solutions, the foreign operators’ hegemony and vendor lock-in prevent the growth of an autonomous cloud ecosystem in Europe.

The announcement is a milestone towards the creation of a EuroStack. Sovereign APIs like SECA are a crucial tool for reducing dependence on non-European providers and ensuring a leveled playing field, where competition is based on the quality of solutions rather than on the exploitation of market dominance.

In parallel, multiple ambitious European initiatives aim to offer a sovereign tech infrastructure to the continent. Amongst these, the DEP (Digital Europe Program), funded with €9B, and the IPCEI Cloud, funded with €3B, unite hundreds of industrial and research organisations from all Member States.

“This annoucement proves that the EuroStack strategy is correct:  we need solutions to federate Europe’s fragmented industrial capacity.  The use of interoperability standards is one of such solutions. If the public sector could support the adoption of such interoperability standards by private companies, the effect would be the growth of a sovereign tech ecosystem.  Another key solution is the convergence of EU projects towards market-driven initiatives. If the EU funded cloud projects joined forces with private vendors under SECA, the effect would be massive” stated Secretary General Sebastiano Toffaletti.

For any media inquiries on this matter, please contact:

Sofia Gottarelli, Events and Communications Manager (European DIGITAL SME Alliance) at s.gottarelli@digitalsme.eu