European Union Data Sovereignty and the Role of Storage Providers with Jerome Lecat of Scality

The world has become globally dependent on digital information. Enterprises, service providers and government agencies depend on free access to data as delivered through IT infrastructure and underlying technologies, and delivered as cloud services. This puts governments in the position of ensuring that their regional and local industries have access to this information technology, and that the supply chain is not disrupted. After the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2016, the EU published regulations on the free flow of non-personal data (FFD), plus a Cybersecurity Act and Open Data Directive in 2019. Early in 2020, the EU released a new Digital Strategy, which includes a five-year policy roadmap and a proposal for the creation of a single European market for data. This is underpinned on the idea of Data Sovereignty, which focuses on the intention of the EU to reduce its technological dependencies on foreign entities, and rely more on European cloud services.

In this session, Scality CEO and Founder Jerome Lecat will discuss the principles of data sovereignty, the emergence of new cloud service providers to address these EU specific requirements, and the role of storage technology vendors in this forming landscape.