Contract worth €180m to cover services over the next six years
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The European Commission has signed a contract with a group of purely European cloud providers to purchase cloud services worth €180 million from them over the next six years.
The deal involves Post Telecom (with partners CleverCloud and OVHcloud), Stack IT of the Schwarz Group, Iliad’s Scaleway, and Proximus (with Thales and Google Cloud, Clarence and Mistral). They will provide their IT services to institutions of the European Union.
To assess the sovereignty of the providers, the Commission has developed the Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Nothing of the sort existed before. This framework translates digital sovereignty into objectively measurable procurement criteria.
The framework measures sovereignty on the basis of eight points: from strategic, legal, operational and environmental considerations to supply chain transparency, technological openness, security and compliance with EU legislation. It introduces Sovereignty Effectiveness Assurance Levels (SEAL, PDF).
It is not known which other parties competed for the contract.
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