Gaia-X explained
Gaia-X is a European initiative dedicated to creating an interoperable data infrastructure, fostering data-driven business models. It is establishing a digital ecosystem based on open-source principles, which allows all participants to exchange data while ensuring that the data owners maintain full data sovereignty. They can freely choose to share their data with third parties or revoke access at any time.
Data Economy for Europe
- Collaboration as the key to digital growth
- Using the enormous potential of data
- Common rules and standards
- Data sovereignty for participants from various industries
European and interoperable Data Infrastructure
As a federated decentralised infrastructure providing users with control over the use of their data as well as enabling edge computing among other factors, Gaia-X enables compliance with the General Data Protection Regulatiomn (GDPR). This provides users with a trustworthy and reliable infrastructure to share data.
Data-based Business Models for small and medium-sized Enterprises
The primary target group of Gaia-X are companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and organisations that are seeking to share their data, create value from it, and develop new data-driven business models. To facilitate data transfer, Gaia-X provides a common framework for access and transport protocols, services, and policies. All these guidelines adhere to the principles of transparency, data security, privacy, interoperability, and scalability.
Building a decentralized, federated System
Advantages and Benefits of Gaia-X
Unlike existing data infrastructures (e.g. cloud computing) and related services in the market, the Gaia-X infrastructure and ecosystem is built upon European principles such as data security, GDPR compliance, transparency, and interoperability.
Situation without Gaia-X
Data silos
One central point of storage
Vendor Lock-In
Change of provider hardly possible for financial reasons.
Ambiguous data security
Benefits of Gaia-X
Interoperable open interfaces
enable a secure data exchange and the generation of added value from data.
Decentalised Storage
All data remains on the storage of the organisations and companies owning them.
Open Source
Possibility to combine various providers and flexibly adapt to industry-specific requirements.
Data Sovereignty
Data owners remain in full control of their data and decide when and which data may be used by third parties.
Organisational structure of Gaia-X
Within the Gaia-X ecosystem, the tasks are distributed among the following players:
Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud AISBL
The non-profit organization under Belgian law (Association Sans But Lucratif, abbreviated to AISBL) was founded in Brussels in 2020 and develops the overarching strategic direction of Gaia-X on the European level.
- Development of the Gaia-X framework and specifications for data exchange
- Operator of the Gaia-X federation services
- Various working groups in the Data Space Business Committee, Policy and Rules Committee and Technical Committee
Gaia-X Federation Services GXFS-DE
- Development of free software components on an open source basis for the creation of federated digital ecosystems
- Reference code for the five work packages Identity & Trust, Federated Catalogue, Sovereign Data Exchange, Compliance and Portal & Integration
Gaia-X Hub Germany
- Information and organization of events for interested parties and members of the community about Gaia-X
- Coordination of the industry-specific working groups and organization of regular domain meetings
- Strong network of German and international stakeholders