End-to-end mastery and control of the chain of collecting, storing, processing, analyzing and exploiting data collected on European territory is crucial to the digital resilience of France and the European Union (EU).
In our "Digital Resilience" thematic dossier, we offer you 6 articles to define the framework of our Digital Resilience as well as its challenges and components. 4th article dedicated to AI, the data masteryand the Cloud, this article follows on from the presentation of the six key challenges of Digital Resilience.
Challenges for data storage and use / AI in the context of massive cloud development
Digital sovereignty relies on the development of strong expertise, both private and public, in the Cloud andArtificial Intelligence, and must be accompanied by an active policy of digital sobriety.
What's the current state of the European Cloud?
First of all, the European Cloud market is highly concentrated, with three American players (hyperscalers) - Google, Amazon and Microsoft - sharing 69% of the market.
Although public and private initiatives are multiplying, they are struggling to gain credibility and represent a serious threat to these three players.
- Public projects such as the French Cloud (Andromède, 2009) or the German Cloud (Bundes Cloud, 2011) have failed.
- The European cloud Gaia-X (2019 with 15 founding companies, 359 in November 2022) is criticized for the complexity of its governance and financing, as well as its dependence on non-European players such as Alibaba, Palantir and Huawei.
However, the availability of sovereign Cloud solutions is of strategic importance for France and the EU. Indeed, this market, driven by strong growth and transformative innovations such as Edge Computing, has a major economic impact.
What's more, this would make it possible to meet the growing demand for data privacy and protection, currently at risk due to the incompatibility of European and non-European legislation (for example, the RGPD vs. American Cloud Act and the Schrems II ruling invalidating the Privacy Shield).
Finally, a sovereign European Cloud would protect European citizens and businesses from anti-competitive practices, such as the lack of interoperability between different American Cloud solutions, which creates a high level of dependency in the long term.
This is why France and the EU, as well as European companies, need to develop sovereign solutions. While 100% French or European solutions are possible (e.g., NumSpot from Docapost, Dassault Systèmes, Bouygues and Banque des Territoires), the backlog is pushing French and European players to seek partnerships with hyperscalers - S3NS between Google and Thalès (horizon 2024), Bleu between Orange, Capgemini and Microsoft (2024) and an initiative in the pipeline between Amazon and Atos.
Artificial intelligence must become central to our digital resilience
Similarly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become central to both private and public players, with use cases in all sectors and functions:
- protein structure discovery(AlphaFold) ;
- AI-based military drones (for example, in Ukraine);
- non-invasive underground exploration(Exodigo) ;
- intelligent patient monitoring(Clinomic Mona);
- automated vehicle inspection(Ravin) ;
- LiDAR detection system for autonomous cars(AEye) ;
- cargo tracking(Bearing) ;
- information extraction and false document detection(Ocrolus).
As with Cloud solutions, the field is currently dominated by a handful of major private players in the US (GAFAM, Palantir) and China (BATX), supported by a dense ecosystem of hyper-performing start-ups (e.g. DeepMind and Google) and an attractive, well-funded and innovative academic base.
To catch up, France and Europe will need to focus their AI strategy on two key areas.
- Promoting private financing for start-ups ;
- Be pro-active in strengthening links between academia and industry to create the right conditions for innovation and the development of new AI-based solutions.
Digital sobriety: an important lever for our digital resilience
Finally, digital sobriety, for the time being only indirectly highlighted by RGPD, has become an important lever for digital resilience.
Indeed, driven by a dual phenomenon of increasing Internet users and usage, digital activities totaled 3.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2017, and estimates predict an acceleration to 7.6% by 2025, notably due to the democratization of innovations such as cryptocurrencies and IoT. By way of comparison, the aviation sector accounted for 2% of these emissions in 2017.
On the other hand, regarding the breakdown of emissions in the digital sector, terminals (smartphones, computers, screens, etc.) account for around 80% (Green IT, 2019) of environmental impacts (in France) versus 14% for data centers and 5% for networks. Legislation is already in place, such as the November 15, 2021 law aimed at reducing the environmental footprint of digital in France with the section "Promoting less energy-intensive datacenters and networks" or initiatives such as So.Num lasting 4 years to put the law's proposals into practice, but they are still preliminary and limited to recommendations and indicators.
France and the EU must seek to reconcile the inevitable increase in data volumes (storage and computing) with current environmental challenges, in order to develop a model that is sustainable over time and not just sovereign.
In conclusion
To meet the challenges of digital sobriety and sovereignty, France and the EU must :
- Push purely French and European Cloud initiatives to address legislative incompatibilities and to enable us to guarantee our sovereignty over strategic sectors (avoid cases such as the DGSI using solutions from Palantir, a company funded by the CIA from 2015 to 2021).
- Activate legislative levers to enable the emergence of these Cloud initiatives (limit anti-competitive practices and enable multi-cloud with interoperability).
- Promoting private funding for AI start-ups
- Strengthening academic and industrial links to accelerate the development of innovative AI solutions
- Go further in the regulations on data and AI sobriety, going beyond the stage of recommendations and indicators, both on the storage (Cloud) and use (AI) of data
- Take action on equipment, as digital terminals are responsible for around 80% of emissions in the digital sector.
All articles in the "Digital resilience" section
Digital resilience: France's connectivity and the resilience of our digital networks
Internet service providers, clouds, operating systems and online platforms are all digital services that have become indispensable. The vast majority are offered by
Digital resilience: training and retaining digital talent
Profiles with expertise in strategic digital areas such as Cloud services, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cybersecurity are very important, both in terms of the quality of our services and the quality of our products.
Digital resilience: Web3, the future of the Internet
Web3 is presented as a Web of trust, based on key principles (decentralization, community sovereignty, new ownership models, etc.). In our
Digital resilience: cybersecurity and supply
Building French and European digital resilience is a fundamental issue of sovereignty that goes far beyond digital issues alone. In our dossier
Digital resilience: definition, key components and challenges
Building French and European digital resilience is a fundamental issue of sovereignty that goes far beyond digital issues alone. It also concerns
