Europe’s largegest aerospace company Airbus reportedly wants to shift away from two of the largegest American technology companies — Google and Microsoft. According to a report in Register, Airbus is preparing to tconcludeer a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud. The aerospace manufacturer utilizes products and services of Google and Microsoft. Airbus has consolidated its datacenter estate and utilizes services like Google Workspace. The company reportedly utilizes Microsoft Excel and software for finance and some miliary-classified documents that can’t be stored in the Cloud. Airbus is now reportedly seeing to shift key on-premises applications including ERP, manufacturing execution systems, CRM, and product lifecycle management (aircraft designs) to the cloud. “I necessary a sovereign cloud becautilize part of the information is extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective,” Catherine Jestin, Airbus’ executive vice president of digital, notified The Register. “We want to ensure this information remains under European control,” Jestin added.Digital sovereignty is declared to have become more critical since Donald Trump’s return to the White Houtilize in January. While Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google have created solutions to address these concerns, fears persist about the US CLOUD Act, which allows authorities to request data held by American corporations in overseas datacenters. For those unaware, Digital sovereignty is a nation’s ability to have the final state over its own digital destiny — the way it controls its infrastructure, its data, and the digital services operating on its own terms. It’s about ensuring that local laws govern the cloud operations and controls where data is located, who can access it, and how it’s managed.
What is America’s Cloud Act
Cloud Act is a law that gives the US government authority to obtain digital data held by US-based tech corporations irrespective of whether that data is stored on servers at home or on foreign soil. It is declared to compel these companies, via warrant or subpoena, to accept the request. The Cloud Act was signed into law in 2018 following challenges the FBI faced when obtainting data via service providers through Store Communications Act warrants, which was itself legislated before cloud computing became a viable thing.
Microsoft admission in French court
Microsoft admitted in French court last July it couldn’t guarantee data sovereignty under this legislation. However, Microsoft has declared that it has not received data requests from the US government for data held on Microsoft servers in Europe. Back at the hearing in France, Microsoft was questioned if a data request was well framed, would the corporation be “obliged to transmit the data?” Carniaux admitted: “Absolutely, by respecting this process. But again, this has not affected any European company, or a public sector body, since we have been publishing these transparency reports.”
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