RETELIT AMONG THE 27 COMPANIES DRAWING UP ROADMAP ON TECHNOLOGICAL AND INDUSTRIAL INVESTMENT PRESENTED TODAY TO THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION.
After joining Gaia-X, the Group led by Federico Protto continues to be at the forefront of a strategic project for digital sovereignty and Europe’s competitiveness in the cloud and edge computing area.
A pool of 27 European companies today presented the EU Commission with an Operational Roadmap identifying the technology priorities on which to direct Euro 19 billion in public and private investment to develop a secure, interoperable, low-carbon cloud and edge ecosystem by 2025.
The European Commission and Member States will use this report as guidance in developing EU investment programs and national plans for EU recovery and resilience funds.
The Round Table was held today of the CEO’s of the 27 companies representing the European digital industry within the "European Alliance on Industrial Data Edge and Cloud", an initiative created on the directions of the European Commission, which, in synergy with other strategic projects such as Gaia-X, seeks to strengthen Europe's digital sovereignty and competitiveness in the field of cloud, data services and edge computing.
Retelit is among the companies that have signed the cooperation agreement; the Group led by Federico Protto has participated together with other European players in drawing up a technological and industrial Roadmap, presented today to the European Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services, Thierry Breton, which outlines operational and investment priorities to develop and adopt competitive, reliable and sustainable Cloud and Edge services across the EU by 2025. A roadmap that clearly identifies the current strengths and weaknesses of the EU market and the technology domains that require priority strategic investments to support this change.
Euro 19 billion to be channelled into the Plan, through a joint operation by the Member States that guides and integrates private, domestic and European funds. Three action macro areas:
1. Investments across the entire Cloud stack to optimize end-to-end energy consumption, environmental impact and cybersecurity
2. Investments to develop the necessary infrastructure (from network and data center to cloud hardware and software) to enable harmonised and easy access to cloud services across Europe
3. Investments aimed at leveraging these capabilities to deliver best-in-class, open, interoperable cloud-edge services to public and private organisations in Europe and beyond.
The Roadmap therefore lays the foundations for building a distributed federation of European Clouds capable of competing globally, aiming for leadership in security, sustainability and the interoperability of the services offered. A key consideration is that the advancement of European cloud offerings is essential to increase the competitiveness of EU businesses and provide citizens, public administrations, and companies around the world with greater choice in computing infrastructure and services to develop future data-driven innovations and emerging technologies, such as 5G / 6G and artificial intelligence.
The goal is also to encourage the adoption of more secure and energy-efficient data centers and cloud services, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses, start-ups and the public sector. In fact, the Roadmap is consistent with the EU's goals of doubling the use of advanced Cloud services by 2025 and achieving climate neutrality of Data Centers across the EU by 2030, as well as the Digital Decade's goal of deploying "10,000 climate neutral and secure edge nodes" across the EU to ensure access to low-latency data services wherever businesses are located.
“The Roadmap to which we had the honour of contributing outlines a clear path: Europe must strengthen and differentiate its value proposition in cloud computing, while tapping into the opportunities of global leadership in edge computing, through steps that can no longer be postponed - stated Federico Protto CEO of Retelit Group - Retelit, among the first to join Gaia-X, cooperates within this Alliance to contribute to the creation of a highly-competitive European cloud market, which can stimulate innovation, where services are interconnected, easy to use and built on common standards and values. In addition, our contribution, through the Roadmap, is to focus also in Italy the investment in strategically important sectors - cybersecurity, smart mobility, industry 4.0, environment, aerospace and health - in which the biggest changes will take place and where protection, sovereignty and the guarantee of data are crucial to ensure that it is a resource at the service of growth and to stimulate recovery."
The 27 companies, founding members of the future "European Alliance on Industrial Data Edge and Cloud." will continue to cooperate on the implementation of the Roadmap, also defining more clearly the guidelines for non-European cloud providers, which will have to guarantee security standards, data and consumer protection, data portability and energy efficiency and contribute to European digital sovereignty, while also offering adequate assurance that strategic and sensitive data will remain under EU control.