One platform — standardized, built and operated by many.
One platform — standardized, built and operated by many.
Berlin, 2024-10-23: Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) provides all cloud-technological foundations to realize digital sovereignty and open source strategies and gives users control over their data. The research project, funded by the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action and carried out by the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), will be concluded as planned on 2024-12-31. The OSBA and 14 member companies have taken care to ensure a sustainable future for the key results and to further advance the SCS standards.
Sovereign Cloud Stack, funded with roughly 13.2 million Euros, will continue to receive professional development and be available for the cloud market after the project phase. The OSBA and 14 of its member companies are founding the forum SCS-standards effective 2025-01-01. This consortium inside the OSBA takes responsibility for the standards and certifications and their further evolution in the future. This also ensures the quality assurance in a sustainable manner. All users of Sovereign Cloud Stack and the whole ecosystem around SCS can thus have assurance of relying on a future-proof cloud technology.
"SCS embodies quality, transparency and interoperability in the IT industry. The core topics of standardization and certification are continued in the newly founding forum SCS-Standards to protect these values." explains Peter Ganten, chairman of the OSBA.
"SCS needs to be advanced even without public subsidies. If we manage to improve the market conditions and create offerings from various cloud service providers that are interoperable and federatable thanks to common standards, this will have beneficial effects on the German and European cloud economy overall and will lead to long-term success. This is the reason for our members to invest time and money." comments Marius Feldmann, COO of Cloud&Heat, chairman of ALASCA e.V. and one of the two interim chairs of the forum.
Up to now, 14 companies have collected an annual budget of 257,000 Euros. Their engagement goes beyond the financial support: They are supporting the SCS ideas and the common standards. The founding members thus far are (in alphabetical order):
The founding members of the forum SCS-Standards are members of the OSBA. Further companies can support the forum as shaping, consulting or supporting member. The membership fees depend on the membership level as well as the company’s financial turnover.
The founding members already started to collaborate intensively, two and a half months ahead of the official establishment. The founding members include cloud service providers, data center operators, integrators, developers, security and training specialists.
"Our aspiration is to take over the results around the topic SCS standards from the SCS project on 2025-01-01 and be set up to be fully operational then. We want to process SCS certifications and award companies in 2025 that are able to fulfill the demanding requirements from the SCS-Standards." explains Ralph Dehner of B1 Systems, co-chair of the forum.
"The non-profit approach, the openness of the standards and the fair access for all market players is strongly anchored by founding the forum SCS-Standards within the OSBA by the engaged founding members. This is a substantial contribution to digital sovereignty in Germany and Europe." comments Peter Ganten, chairman of the OSBA, and expresses his gratitude to the involved companies.
The forum SCS-Standards is open for further members. Interested parties should contact forum-scs-standards@osb-alliance.com.
SCS is being funded by the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) since July 2021 and is run by the Open Source Business Alliance e.V. A growing international ecosystem of meanwhile more than 25 companies contributes to its success with more than 50 software developers, collaborating with thousands of developers in the upstream communities around the OpenInfra Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation and others. There also exists a partnership with ALASCA e.V.. An open development process is used to jointly define open standards for a modern, federatable open source cloud and container platform. Proven open source components are used to implement them in production-grade software. In addition, operation knowledge and processes are made transparent to overcome the challenges of providing a highly reliable and secure cloud service to a high degree. The SCS technology is already used by six public cloud providers in production to provide of truly sovereign and GDPR compliant cloud offerings. More setups – both public and private clouds – are built. SCS also contributes to Gaia-X and delivers the development platform for the Gaia-X Federation Services / Cross-Federation Service Components (GXFS/XFSC).
The Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) is the association of the Open Source Industry in Germany. It represents over 200 member companies, who together have a turnover of above 126 billion Euros. Together with scientific institutes and user organizations, it advocates for the public awareness of the key importance of Open Source Software and Open Standards for a successful digital transformation. It supports innovation for Open Source. The goal of the OSB Alliance is to establish Open Source as a standard policy in public procurement and in publicly supported research and economic development projects. Open Source and Open Standards represent the inevitable foundation for digital sovereignty, freedom to innovate and security in the digital transformation and thus the answer to one of the most significant challenges of our time.
Contact:
Open Source Business Alliance – Bundesverband für digitale Souveränität e.V. Pariser Platz 6a 10117 Berlin
Lisa Reisch Press officer of the OSBA, Tel.: +49 (30) 300 149 3377 email Internet