-The goal is build a cloud infrastructure that ensures data sovereignty and control, a critical asset today and in the future
-Daniel Sáez Domingo, director of Strategic Intelligence and Transfer of ITI, has just been elected member of the board of directors of the European Data and Cloud Association, Gaia -X AISBL, being the only Spanish member
-With his support for this initiative, the tech center pursues the data economy to become a reality, supporting the projects that contribute to it
ITI, a technology center specializing in information and communication technologies (ICT), has just joined the steering committee charged with leading the launch of the European project Gaia-X. ITI is the only Spanish entity in this steering committee for the next two years, and intervenes with the firm commitment to contribute to making the decisions that help to unite wills, initiatives and interests in Europe and that this initiative can be the point of reference that add up, and to which more than 250 entities have already joined , leading companies, associations, start-ups and purely European research centers.
After an electoral process that began on 25 May and in which 64 recognized candidates from leading companies and technology centers in Europe aspired to occupy one of the 24 seats on the Association's "Board of Directors", the 7 June, Daniel Sáez Domingo, Director of Strategic Intelligence and Transfer at ITI, was elected a member of this select group.
"Europe needs infrastructure to share and exploit data and maintain its sovereignty, and it is an honor to be part of the steering committee of this ambitious project and to help ITI consolidate this commitment by contributing with our network. of allies across Europe and technology components that facilitate their implementation, ”says Daniel Sáez.
Now more than ever we live in a globalized and hyper-connected society. The development and implementation of ICT in all areas of society and productive sectors has led to the collection of large amounts of data that did not previously exist.
The health and economic crisis that arose after COVID-19, far from being an obstacle, has pushed companies that had not done so until now, to bet on digitization. Many of these data are precious, coming to be considered "the new oil" and can be used for different purposes, applying Big Data and Artificial Intelligence techniques on them. This is why it is important that data is protected and well governed.
“At ITI we have opted for this project because we have to stop depending on cloud servers from other continents. In a context where data has so much power at a strategic level, It is essential to have closer data infrastructures ”, Explains Laura Olcina, ITI CEO.
ITI has been a day one member of Gaia-X since mid 2020. By joining this European Gaia-X initiative, ITI makes its strategy and positioning of projects and technologies that revolve around data, in this case, supporting a pioneering initiative that aims to be the definitive European alternative to cloud services offered by other world powers.
The momentum of the Gaia-X project follows the line of the latest European initiatives in the field of data, such as the laws governing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the negotiations for large technology companies outside the European Union that pay taxes in the European countries where they have customers and not where they are based.
Towards a "European sovereignty" of data in the cloud
The Gaia-X alliance is made up of a large cloud platform that operates as a non-profit public-private collaboration organization, which seeks to establish itself as an alternative to the most famous American platforms worldwide, known by the acronym GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple), in addition to Microsoft.
The initiative is the first step towards a 'European sovereignty' of data in the cloud to stop depending on the servers of companies from other continents. Eg, one third of the IBEX-35 companies operate with cloud services from North American operators, therefore, millions of data from the main companies of the Spanish economy are in the hands of other powers, with the risk that this entails.
GAIA-X emerged in 2020 and has the support of large European companies such as SAP, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, Bosch, Deutsche Bank, Orange, DE-CIX or Atos, among others, as well as internationally renowned research centers such as This is the case of ITI, the first and only organization in the Valencian Community to join the project that guides European digital data sovereignty.
