Aircraft manufacturer Airbus will begin a tender process in January for the migration of critical applications to a digitally sovereign European cloud. The contract could run for up to ten years and is worth more than €50 million. However, Airbus executive Catherine Jestin estimates the chance of finding a suitable solution at only 80 percent.
The Register was the first to report on the possible migration. Airbus wants to move key on-premises applications such as ERP, manufacturing execution systems, CRM, and product lifecycle management to the cloud. The reason is access to new software: vendors such as SAP now develop innovations exclusively in the cloud. Anyone who wants to use S/4HANA must therefore make the move to the cloud.
But not every cloud is suitable for Airbus. Some of the information is “extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective,” says Catherine Jestin, executive vice president of digital at Airbus. The company wants to ensure that this data remains under European control. The tender process will start in early January, with a decision to be made before the summer.
Geopolitical reality
Although Microsoft, AWS, and Google have created solutions to address these concerns, questions remain about the US CLOUD Act.
This law allows US authorities to request data held by US companies, including in data centers outside the US. In July, Microsoft acknowledged in a French court that it cannot guarantee data sovereignty under this legislation. Jestin is waiting for clarification from European regulators as to whether Airbus is truly “immune to extraterritorial laws” and whether services could be interrupted.
European scale questionable
Airbus has doubts about the scale of European cloud providers. Jestin gives the chances of success an 80 percent rating.
The Dutch government is facing similar dilemmas. The Netherlands Court of Audit recently concluded that the government has limited insight into cloud services and does not make sufficient risk assessments. Of the 1,588 government cloud services, it is unclear whether 411 of them run on American, European, or other infrastructure.