Tech Sovereignty Needs Technical Solution

European ambitions to replace foreign tech solutions with domestic alternatives are “unrealistic” in the short term, warned the head of the German cybersecurity head cybersecurity agency in a call for greater technological control over cloud platforms.

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In a Sunday blog post, Claudia Plattner, president of the German Federal Office for Information Security, said European ambitions to escape “cyber dominance” requires implementing new levels of technical control.

“Public administration in particular is under massive digitalization pressure. This requires powerful, trustworthy solutions. Since many innovations are currently being created outside Europe, a complete switch to European technologies is unrealistic in the short term,” Plattner said, according to a machine translation.

An approach taken by the German office, known as the BSI, is to take control of foreign-made technology, but in a way “that they can be used sovereignly, i.e. controllably and with data security.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has pitched tech sovereignty as a means to bridge the “innovation gap with the U.S. and China” by putting “research, innovation, science and technology at the heart of the economy” (see: New EU Tech Commissioner to Focus on Tech Sovereignty).

European ambitions for technology developed elsewhere than Silicon Valley gained impetus after trade relations between Washington and Brussels soured since U.S. President Donald Trump took charge, accusing the European Union early on in his presidency of acting “very, very unfairly and very badly.”

A slew of European governments over the past 30 days have announced moves to ditch Microsoft Windows or the Office suite, including the country of Denmark, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein and French city Lyon.

A key European focus has been cloud sovereignty. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud provide 72% of cloud services in Europe. The EU fears dependence could reduce its “strategic autonomy.”

In the case of cloud, Plattner recommended European governments adopt “technical control mechanisms” as counterweights. Among them are cryptography and independent instances of cloud platforms based in Europe. Organizations must have insight and control over data transmitted to providers – and in “critical cases,” the cloud provider should be European.

Since there is no continental agreement on a “single solution,” member states are likely to adopt “cloud models with varying degrees of sovereignty, dependent on the sector and type of data being stored, managed and accessed,” said Martin Hosken, field CTO for Cloud Providers at Broadcom.

A potential drawback of European capitals enacting their version of technical controls could be a dwindling interoperability, said Katharina Sommer, group head of government affairs at NCC Group.

“We might see a reality where nation-states favor their own homegrown solutions, but businesses still want to operate internationally. That might affect trade and free trade agreements. We’re starting to see some of that play out,” Sommer said.