Resource Regions: Central and Eastern Europe

You often see it on television: programs about people who are struggling financially. They run out of money at the end of the month, they can’t sell their house, they have a problematic debt burden, and so on. A common denominator is often the lack of insight into their own situation, and while coming up with ways to save money may not be very difficult, actually implementing and sticking to them is much harder.

I mean, it’s easy for an outsider to suggest that someone should get rid of their dog, but if that pet is their only source of comfort, it will take some effort.

The same goes for cloud costs: saving money is easier said than done. There are all sorts of great tools available from both cloud providers and third parties to help you understand your costs.

These tools provide various reports and dashboards, and even recommendations on which instances to remove or resize (rightsizing). With the right knowledge, you can also determine how to use discount options (reserved instances, savings plans, reserved capacity, etc.), how to manage licenses intelligently, and what you can do in your application architecture to save costs. And, of course, you can always turn off instances when you’re not using them.

All of this insight is great, but then comes the second part. Just as people have a hard time saying goodbye to their pets, users and administrators have a hard time shedding their old habits and ways of thinking. And that’s something cloud providers never talk about.

For example, consider turning off instances outside of working hours. In theory, this is an excellent way to save money, but instances are part of applications, which in turn are part of chains. It can happen that data exchange takes place in a chain outside of working hours.

Testing teams that are under a deadline may also need their environment outside of the predetermined working hours. And if environments are used in the management chain, they must also be available after working hours in case of an emergency. So savings are theoretically simple, but practice is more complicated. It can be done, but it takes a lot of effort.

Rightsizing is also less straightforward than it seems. Users and administrators are often hesitant to remove capacity: users see their performance decrease, and administrators see the risk of more outages because there is less excess capacity to handle issues. In the latter case, you need to analyze where these issues are coming from: a poor application can benefit from more capacity, but that is not a long-term solution.

If the roof is leaking, you can replace the bucket you use to catch the water with a mortar tub, but even that will eventually fill up. Ultimately, you’ll have to repair the roof.

So, objections can be raised for all types of savings. Eventually, you’ll need to adopt an approach that not only makes costs visible but also involves users and administrators, and leads to the right considerations on where to save on your cloud costs and where not to.

Don’t know where to start? Can’t figure it out quickly enough? IDC Metri has helped several organizations get started. Our specialists can help kickstart your cost-saving efforts in the cloud. Because understanding costs is one thing, but it’s only useful if they actually decrease.

Want to learn more? Subscribe to IDC Metri’s monthly newsletter full of actionable insights on IT benchmarking, intelligence, sourcing and more.

I was born in Ravenna, on the east coast of Emilia-Romagna, one of the most liveable and prosperous regions in Italy. Emilia-Romagna is home to 7.3% of the Italian population. It accounts for 9.2% of GDP and 11.8% of agricultural production.

It headquarters globally successful firms in automotive, motorbikes, food production, ceramic tiles, textile and fashion, biomedical engineering, construction, woodworking equipment and much more. Unemployment is at 5.1%, well below the 2022 national average of 8.2%. Life expectancy is higher than the national average.

There are white sandy beaches, natural reserves in coastal wetlands, and beautiful hills and mountains, which combined with a rich heritage — Ravenna alone boasts eight UNESCO heritage sites — and amazing food and wine attract tens of millions of tourists every year.

Besides these material treasures, there is a unique way of living in Emilia-Romagna. And even more so in Romagna, where I grew up; there’s an old saying that you can tell if you are in the Romagna part of the region because when a stranger shows up at someone’s door, they are welcomed with a smile and a glass of wine. On the Emilia side, they’ll be equally warmly welcomed, but with a glass of water!

There is a sense of shared joy, a passion for life and a pride in belonging to one’s community. A shared sense of resilience that drives people to go through the hardness of life with a smile on their face, and always trying to put a smile on someone else’s. Because there is always a little bit of magic, even in the small things.

As Federico Fellini, the world-famous movie director and one of the most beloved children of our region, once said: “Life is a combination of magic and pasta.”

It feels good to be a Romagnolo. And to visit Romagna … unless you happened to be there in the first two weeks of May 2023.

Smart River and Water Management: Preparing for Foreseeable Disasters

After many months of drought, in the first 17 days of May 2023, Romagna was hit by as much rain as it usually gets in six months. In some areas this meant up to 400mm of rain in two weeks. To put things in perspective, one of the worst hit municipalities, Faenza, which is home to 60,000 people, experiences on average 760mm of rain a year.

The stereotypical rainy London gets 690mm a year. The result of this unusually heavy rain was that 23 rivers burst their banks, resulting in 50 floods; 305 landslides devastated hills and mountains, 14 people died and over 36,000 people were displaced from their homes. The estimated economic damage to homes, factories, farms and public infrastructure is north of €5 billion, with around €600 million just to rebuild public infrastructure.

Climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of these extreme weather events. Long-term environmental sustainability actions, which are progressing way too slowly, will not be enough.

Resilience to short-term shocks is imperative. Money is not the problem; in fact, there is an estimated €8 billion available from the Italian COVID Recovery and Resilience Plan and the “Italia Sicura” (Safe Italy) plan to make public infrastructure more resilient. This, however, is at risk of not being spent, or not spent well, because of lack of planning, skill gaps, slow public procurement, and insufficient competencies and capacity to audit.

Technology innovation is not a silver bullet, but when implemented wisely it can help fill some of those gaps. The increasing availability and granularity of data from satellite images, IoT sensors, weather monitoring and forecasting models already tell us that Italy has the highest amount of rain in Europe, with 300 billion cubic meters a year.

Building permitting systems, public works inspection systems and other sources tell us that Emilia-Romagna was the fourth worst region in terms of soil consumption in Italy in 2021, including in areas at high risk of flooding. By building on the existing knowledge, collecting more data and turning the data into intelligent smart river and water management insights, governments, water utilities and the public could make better decisions across the disaster resilience life cycle, from mitigation to preparedness, from response to recovery.

• Mitigation: Governments can use a wide variety of tools to develop hazard maps that can identify areas most at risk and feed into planning and preparedness systems. Policymakers and building inspectors can feed intelligent insights into planning and operational simulation tools, such as digital twins, to simulate the impact of building code and permitting decisions to reduce soil consumption and require the use of more resilient building techniques and materials.
• Preparedness: The benefits of building flood resilient systems (dams, levees, flood walls and diversion canals, etc.) to protect natural systems such as wetland, marshes and beaches, and using resilient building techniques such as tiled pavements instead of concrete for parking lots and roads to increase water absorption, can be augmented by making these assets and tools intelligent. The intelligence from those systems can enable real-time or preventive decisions about diversion tactics, rather than reacting only when the flood is too close.
• Response: Real-time data from weather forecasting models, integrated with data from dam and river sensors, should be analysed to detect anomalies to automatically raise emergency alerts that can then promptly notify citizens, rather than having to rely on fire and police patrols roaming the roads of small rural villages and towns using loud speakers to tell citizens to evacuate homes or expecting mayors to post videos on social media hoping everybody pays attention, as happened in the past two weeks in Romagna. More intelligent use of data can also provide insights for command-and-control personnel to coordinate first responders and orchestrate the supply of food, clothes and medicine for shelters, instead of relying on emails, spreadsheets and phone calls.
• Recovery: Digital twins would allow evidence-based infrastructure planning decisions and monitoring the progress of investments aimed to rebuild infrastructure, therefore increasing speed and transparency of projects to avoid wasting time and money. AR/VR tools can help engineers conduct inspections when anomalies are detected.

The same technology infrastructure — with a few additions in terms of sensors and applications — will provide intelligent insights for other use cases, such as water conservation in dry seasons, leakage reduction, biodiversity protection in rivers, marshes and ports, sustainable water transportation, and water quality.

Only two days after the peak of the emergency, millions of euros, as well as food, clothing and other supplies, had been donated to flooded areas in Emilia-Romagna from all over Italy and beyond. Boosted by the typical Romagnolo spirit, spontaneous neighbourhood efforts have mushroomed to clean mud from houses, roads and farms. Beaches have already been cleaned for the upcoming tourist season. But that resolve to recover quickly should not allow us to forget what happened. We know what the future holds. Extreme weather events will happen, not only in well-known high-risk flooding areas, such as the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and Pacific and Caribbean Islands, but also in traditionally safer regions of the world.

Technology innovation will be critical to climate change resilience. But technology alone will not be enough. It’s not enough to feel compassion to help when disaster happens. We need to invest in mitigation and preparedness measures that generate the highest long-term returns.

AI Act: How Did We Get Here and Where Are We Now?

In April 2021, the European Commission submitted a detailed proposal of its plan to regulate artificial intelligence development and use in Europe: the AI Act. The AI Act’s goal is to ensure that the development and deployment of AI systems in Europe is safe, transparent and compliant with the EU’s fundamental rights and values ― protecting the public, while still fostering innovation.

The Commission adopted a “general approach” on a set of harmonized rules on artificial intelligence in November 2022, but rapid progress of the technology, together with the sudden wave of innovation in Generative AI systems, delayed the final discussion of the legislation as new amendments to cover the latest developments were explored. On May 11, the European Parliament committees approved the AI Act with a large majority in a vote that paves the way to the plenary vote in mid-June (June 14 as a tentative date).

Let’s now look at the main principles of the proposed regulation and how it will impact the AI market in the region.

Regulating the Development and Deployment of AI in the EU ―  Key Aspects of the AI ACT

The proposal identifies three (+1) risk categories for AI applications and applies different restrictions and obligations on system providers and users, depending on the category of the application in question:

• Unacceptable risk: applications that involve subliminal practices, exploitative or social scoring systems by public authorities. Such applications will be banned.
• High risk: applications related to education, healthcare and employment, such as CV-scanning, ranking job applicants, will be subject to specific legal requirements (e.g., ensure transparency and safety of the systems, complying with the Commission’s mandatory conformity requirements). Providers of “high-risk” systems will have obligations to establish quality management systems, keep up-to-date technical documentation, undergo conformity assessments (and re-assessments) of the systems, conduct post-market monitoring, and collaborate with market surveillance authorities.
• Limited risk: this mostly includes AI systems such as chatbots that will be subject to specific transparency obligations (e.g., disclosing that interactions are performed by a machine, so that users can take informed decisions).
• Minimal risk: applications that are not listed as risky, nor explicitly banned are left largely unregulated (e.g., AI-enabled video games). Currently, this category covers the majority of AI systems used in the EU.

How Will the AI Act Affect the European AI Landscape?

The introduction of the European AI Act has sparked discussions on its potential impact on the adoption of AI technologies. Will this regulation hinder AI innovation in Europe? The answer is not straightforward, as it depends on various factors and the evolving landscape.

AI regulation may impose compliance costs, administrative burdens, and legal uncertainty on businesses and developers. Extensive testing, validation, and monitoring of AI systems may become necessary, which can be time-consuming and expensive. There might also be limitations on the types of applications, industries, data, or algorithms used in AI systems.

However, when assessing the direct impact on AI use cases falling under the regulated risk categories, the outcome is not overwhelmingly negative. When we at IDC built a data model to verify which and how many AI use cases will be directly impacted (we considered those that would fall into the above listed risk categories) the outcome was only modest, and we have not seen the impact, defined by possible lost revenue, to be worrying.

The compliance costs and administrative burdens could be challenging for SMEs and startups, though, which may inhibit competition in Europe if larger, more established providers find it easier to comply.

Industries like healthcare, public administration or finance are likely to face more stringent requirements due to their potential impact on human life and safety. Transparency, explainability, human oversight, and restrictions on the use of, for example, biometric identification technologies are some of the obligations that might be imposed. While these requirements may limit certain applications, they also aim to protect privacy and individual rights. However, it’s important to note that this regulation offers a list of exemptions, so if you are a provider for national security interests, you may not need to worry about that too much.

On the positive side, regulation has the potential to enhance wider trust and confidence in AI systems. This is crucial in countering overhyped pop culture-fed media narratives of AI as a threat. A trusted regulatory framework always reduces legal uncertainty and creates a level playing field for businesses, public institutions and consumers and citizens. Wisely designed laws will improve the quality and safety of AI systems and will first and foremost safeguard individuals.

The AI Act aims to encourage AI technologies that align with ethical and societal values that the EU strongly supports, such as transparency, accountability, and human-centricity. It wants to stimulate research and development in these areas and promote collaboration and openness among organizations and regions. By establishing common standards and best practices, the EU facilitates knowledge exchange and expertise sharing.

Conclusion

Looking at AI regulation through the lens of healthcare offers valuable insights. Healthcare regulations ensure safety, efficacy, and patient rights. They impose requirements on manufacturers to meet necessary standards. Similarly, AI regulations can ensure ethical and safe technology use while balancing innovation and protection.

While the potential impact of the European AI Act on AI adoption and innovation may present challenges, it also offers opportunities. By adhering to the regulatory framework, AI providers can navigate the landscape effectively, gain public trust, and promote responsible AI practices.

As the AI Act progresses, it is crucial to stay updated with the latest developments. At IDC, we will closely follow the progress of the AI Act and will continue publishing comprehensive research, providing deeper insights into its implications and potential impact as we approach the EU vote in June.

If you want to know more about this, please contact the team: Lapo Fioretti, Andrea Siviero, Neil Ward-Dutton or Ewa Zborowska

At IDC’s UK & Ireland Security Summit 2023, on April 17, 2022, 60 security leaders from across the UK and Ireland discussed the key theme of the event — “Security Strategy 2023: Managing Risk to Enable Digital Business”.

The summit featured an impressive panel of speakers from our partners and the CISO community, complemented by insights from the IDC’s European Security and Privacy team. Based on the presentations, workshops, and roundtable discussions from over 20 sessions, our top five European cyber security trends are as follows:

1. Threat Landscape

Security practitioners are aware that their attack surfaces are expanding due to digital transformation, remote work, IoT and mobile adoption, and an increasing reliance upon the Web for conducting all aspects of a business. Cyber threats facing organizations are diverse and fast-changing. The ability to understand and mitigate risk depends upon having a clear view on the complexity and dynamic nature of the threat landscape. Who might the threat actors be? How are they trading in terms of selling enterprises’ credentials and vulnerabilities? Employees and contractors at organizations continue to be a point of entry for successful cybercrime. This may be credential theft or more simply end users clicking on malicious links. Standards for security hygiene must be continually assessed and addressed; for example, avoidance of the use of guessable password formats, conducting regular back-ups on different mediums including immutable data back-up and limiting the use of unsanctioned IT or Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).

Businesses should challenge the security industry on how technology vendors and MSSPs can drive security behind the scenes; so that malicious URLs and emails do not appear in the inbox or browser in the first place. Thus, security should become more invisible and frictionless.

2. The Evolving Security Leadership Role

IDC sees the CISO role as a communications conduit to the board and the C-Suite on strategic security topics. It has become important for security leaders to have expanded skills broader than the technicalities of security. The modern CISO needs the capability to understand the overall business strategy and direction: inevitably this will include digital transformation or digital business elements. The CISO must ensure that security outcomes delivered are consistent with business strategy and digital initiatives.

3. The Importance of Cyber Crisis Readiness

A senior speaker from a European government national defence agency highlighted how demonstrations of crisis response during a major global sporting occasion was a valuable exercise, as it gave leaders first-hand experience of how the response to crisis is handled in a realistic scenario. In this example the crisis response group brought in senior government officials to witness crisis response activities. Major cyber-attacks on critical national infrastructure have become national security event, and predetermined crisis centres are essential to give the most effective response to serious incidents. The key takeaway is that security leaders should explore bringing the C-suite and Board into cyber crisis simulation “rooms” to imitate a major attack and use this to critically evaluate responses amongst the executive leadership, as well as build in muscle memory so that appropriate responses are more automatic.

4. Generative AI

It’s agreed that generative AI will have a transformative effect across all aspects of the technology industry, including cyber security. Generative AI is already a major issue as far as cybersecurity is concerned, with generative AI, for example, making phishing attacks much harder to detect. Businesses and governments should be encouraged to move quickly in understanding and responding to these new threats. Unskilled would-be cyber criminals can potentially create malware code using OpenAI, and thus the barriers for entry are now lower than ever, which is driving up the number of potential threat actors and cyber-attack volumes. On the other hand, the application of generative AI can help security teams build up their defences, by applying generative AI to SOC automation and SIEM/SOAR triage.

5. Security Skills Shortages and Lack of Diversity

There continues to be a major skills shortage in cybersecurity that’s been around for a decade. There are initiatives in place to address this, but organizations must do more to address the skills shortage and lack of diversity. MSSPs and security technology vendors should lead on up-skilling and diversity in the industry, by driving training programs, internal skills transfer programs, and efforts to encourage and motivate a more diverse workplace.

Railways are becoming increasingly strategic. They are more energy efficient and pollute less than private vehicles, and they are 15 to 20 times safer than cars.

Compared with private vehicles, they do not entail any fixed cost for travellers. No wonder governments around the world are making huge investments in rail. For instance, 21 out of 27 EU member state national recovery plans have allocated billions to invest in electrification and modernisation of rail infrastructure. President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has nearly tripled funding for rail infrastructure — to $1 billion a year for the next five years.

Airlines struggled to survive when COVID reduced traffic to unprecedented levels. Fuel price increases and labour shortages compounded the effect of COVID by creating the urgency to profoundly rethink business and operating models, while regulators and passengers demand accelerated investment in environmental sustainability, such as more fuel-efficient traffic management, more sustainable fuels and, in the future, zero-emission aviation.

Both industries have reached an inflection point. Hiring more people and growing the size of fleets and number of routes will not be enough to increase capacity utilisation and offer more competitive and personalised services, while maintaining high safety standards and improving environmental sustainability. Achieving those strategic goals will require railway and airline executives to invest in technology innovation.

Bold Ambition for the Future Will Depend on Realising the Value of Technology Innovation

Railways and airlines have invested in technology for many years to deploy digital customer experience capabilities, such as loyalty programmes, self-service booking and mobile payments, intelligent asset and fleet management capabilities to enhance operational excellence, and scheduling of routes and dispatch to bring together high-capacity utilisation and safety.

However, our recent studies show that they are not standing still. They are now looking at the next generation of technologies, such as 5G, artificial intelligence and machine learning, IoT and edge computing, augmented and virtual reality, even quantum computing for traffic optimisation. They are not doing so for the sake of technology, but to achieve four interdependent strategic business goals:

• Increase operational efficiency, while targeting net-zero impact​
• Increase capacity utilisation by combining intelligent scheduling, dispatch and traffic control systems to increase frequency of travel and smart predictive operations to help prevent delays and disruptions 
• Ensure that efficiency goes hand in hand with safety and security, even with higher utilisation rates thanks to digitally enabled physical security systems, regulatory compliance of operations and cybersecurity​
• Increase revenue growth through innovative service offerings, often by making their services and hubs — stations and airports — the anchors of a mobility-as-a-service ecosystem

To empower railway and airline executives to make strategic choices about next-generation technology investments, implement new organisational competencies and capacities that accelerate technology investment benefit realisation, and select tech partners that understand the technical and business evolution of their industry, IDC has launched new research on railways and airlines and transportation hubs.

Stay tuned for upcoming research on topics such as ticketing and revenue management, digital twins for intelligent operations, 5G and cybersecurity.

In Europe, the primary driver for corporate sustainability initiatives is the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). It came into force in January 2023 at EU level and must be transposed into national law in all EU countries within 18 months (by mid-2024).

The EU CSRD aims to improve transparency and accountability around corporate sustainability performance. It also aims to accelerate the integration of environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations into corporate business practices to support the transition to a more sustainable, inclusive economy.

From 2025, those companies already subject to the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) — around 10,000 in Europe — will have to report on a variety of sustainability indicators for their FY24. In the following years, the CSRD will be widened to cover around 50,000 companies — all those listed on EU regulated markets with more than 250 employees, more than €40 million in revenues and/or more than €20 million in total assets. The directive also covers non-EU companies with operations in the EU.

Download eBook: Sustainability in EMEA: Opportunities for Tech Vendors, Challenges for Tech Buyers

The key differences to previous laws are:

• The introduction of standardised, mandatory sustainability metrics on companies’ policies, risks, impacts and outcomes relating to ESG issues
• The mandate to consider double materiality, i.e., identifying all potential negative and positive impacts on people and environment connected with a company’s own operations and its value chain
• The requirement that reported information is audited
• The requirement that reported information is digitally tagged to feed into a European single access point

Non-compliance can lead to sanctions and financial penalties, but also reputational damage.

Our recent surveys have revealed that most companies are in the very early stages of being able to meet these requirements. The measurement of value chain sustainability performance (including Scope 3 emissions and product life-cycle assessments) is very complex and requires the creation of new KPIs and respective data architectures that enable continuous data collection and analysis, real-time monitoring, automated performance reporting, and data assurance.

Register for the webcast: Sustainability in EMEA: The Challenge of Moving from Ambition to Action

Will CSRD Legislation Lead to the Same Last-Minute Rush and Soar in Penalties as with GDPR?

Remember when the GDPR came into effect in May 2018? Shortly before, there was a great rush as organisations prepared for compliance. Why? Because of the threat of severe penalties. And penalties were imposed: since its launch, hundreds of millions of euros of fines have been handed out by data protection authorities around Europe. In 2019, those fines totalled €73 million, rising to €172 million in 2020 and €1.3 billion in 2021 (source: enforcementtracker.com).

As with GDPR, CSRD legislation replaces older laws with new, stricter and better enforced legislation. While they are EU directives, both GDPR and CSRD have “extraterritoriality” enforcement, meaning regulators can fine organisations anywhere in the world if they have operations in the EU and do not comply.

The risks of not being prepared for CSRD are significant. If member states implement similar penalties or sanctions as for financial reporting legislation, organisations could face legal sanctions (imprisonment or disqualification of company directors), public reprimands or penalties, depending on the country-specific enaction.

Non-compliance could also result in reputational damage, loss of stakeholder confidence, allegations of greenwashing and legal action from non-governmental entities such as climate activists.

And it’s not just the CSRD. The EU is also working on a Supply Chain Due Diligence Directive that aims to mitigate the adverse impact of governance, environmental and human rights risks in the value chain of companies selling products within the EU. Many national governing bodies are implementing or tightening mandatory carbon emission and other sustainability regulations.

Investing now in efforts to prepare data collection, analysis and reporting capabilities will keep an organisation ahead of the curve as CSRD and other new sustainability regulations are put in place.

Reporting compliance and impacts on risk management are one thing. Forward-looking companies are going further and are acting on the metrics. They are developing disruptive strategies and road maps for sustainable business transformation that redesigns end-to-end value chains and breaks up traditional industry models.

Circular (instead of linear) economy approaches are emerging, innovation is sustainability driven and products and services are becoming “sustainable by design”. Those approaches — not yet widely seen — are the basis for future-proof organisations that will have a much lower risk profile, greater resilience and long-term strategic growth potential. And they won’t have to fear sustainability regulations.

Related Research

2023 Key Sustainability Trends and Developments in EMEA

Sustainability and ESG Readiness Among European Organizations

Other Resources

IDC Survey Finds Organizations Turning Toward ESG Software Solutions and Independent ESG Program Management

The Need for Harmonised ESG Reporting for Financial Entities

The proliferation of data is transforming businesses and public administrations, and changing consumer experiences and society. The European Union has responded to the challenge with the ambitious European Strategy for Data (2020). One of the pillars of the strategy is the creation of common European data spaces in strategic economic sectors and domains of public interest.

Europe’s strategic data spaces vision is the next stage of evolution of data sharing. Rather than happening only within the boundaries of one organisation or through bilateral contractual agreements that are costly to manage and not conducive to innovation, data sharing must scale to multilateral exchanges, including beyond industry boundaries.

Building on the experience of the European research community with the European Open Science Cloud, the European Strategy for Data proposes an additional nine data spaces. Since the EU Strategy for Data also left the door open for other data spaces to emerge, other EU preparatory actions are planting the seeds for the development of data spaces in adjacent domains, such as cultural heritage, language, media, smart cities and tourism.

The key features of data spaces are:

• Federated technology capabilities that dynamically match data demand and supply in a trustworthy and energy-efficient manner
• Governance policies and processes for secure, transparent, non-discriminatory and fair participation of every data user and data provider
• The ability to make good quality, interoperable data available within and across industries, for non-profit/altruistic purposes, for-profit purposes or both, in compliance with EU regulation

Accelerating Data Sharing

The bold vision for European data spaces still has some way to go. IDC’s research on the future of industry ecosystems (subscription required) found that over 90% of public and private sector organisations globally share data with external partners, but only 30% do it in a consistent and strategic manner, instead of only when strictly necessary and mandated by law. Among European governments, only 22% of organisations have established public-private collaborations to share data for the public interest. There are many digital sovereignty, governance, semantic and technical interoperability challenges to overcome to fully achieve the European data spaces vision. Nonetheless, many actions are accelerating the realisation of the vision:

• European Union grants funding for coordination and support actions, such as DATES
• Implementation of new regulation, such as the Data Governance Act
• Implementation of industry-specific European regulations, such as the Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2017/1926 regarding the provision of multimodal travel information services
• Multilateral initiatives, such as GAIA-X
• Individual country platforms that could then be federated across Europe, such as the smart tourism data platforms being developed by the Italian and Spanish governments
• Individual countries’ investments in digital sovereign computing infrastructure that can support data spaces

We expect data spaces to be realised through different architectural and operating models. For example, some of them could consist of a set of common standards maintained by a non-profit association, while others could be based on a federation of national data platforms operated by member states’ governments that build ad hoc integrations for cross-border data exchange. They could also be centred on a joint platform, owned by one or multiple large private sector enterprises that operate as the anchor for a data space.

The Role of European Government in Data Spaces

As these architectural road maps and operating models evolve, it’s important that European governments take an active role in influencing the trajectory. Governments can play five roles in shaping the future of data spaces:

• Regulator. Governments act as policymakers to set the rules (laws, policies, standards, etc.) for deploying, operating and participating in data spaces.
• Operator. Governments provide the core data space platform services such as onboarding, identity management, data aggregation, data catalogues, data access and billing.
• Enabler. Governments fund and/or provide data space platform infrastructure such as connectivity, cloud and edge computing.
• Data providers. Governments supply data to the data spaces.
• Data users. Governments consume data from the data spaces.

Senior government leaders should not just wait and see for EU-wide regulations and programmes to define the European data spaces road map. They should take a proactive approach to realise the benefits of data sharing by:

• Evaluating what role they want to play to maximise the benefits for the public sector and to incentivise private sector contribution, while setting the example in terms of protecting personal data, intellectual property and digital sovereignty
• Working with the private sector to identify priority use cases, business models, governance models and technical blueprints that accelerate deployment in a secure manner
• Collaborating with technology suppliers and academia to accelerate development of technologies that enable trusted data sharing in federated, heterogeneous environments
• Collaborating with enterprises and industry associations to prioritise the data space in which it makes sense for governments to take an operator or enabler role
• Nurturing organisational competencies and culture that foster data spaces

If you want to learn more about the role governments can play and the capabilities they need for data spaces, read our new study (subscription required) and join us at the IDC Government Xchange.