Grand Est. Towards a regional sovereign cloud to secure the data of SMEs and communities

To no longer depend solely on American digital giants and better prevent the risks of cyberattacks, the Grand Est region committed in December 2021, as part of Act 2 of its Business Act strategy , to creating a regional sovereign cloud for local authorities, public institutions and SMEs in its region. To this end, the Grand Est Développement regional agency began seeking partners to build and launch a data hosting offering based exclusively on existing data centers located in the region and belonging to French or European players.

To strengthen the security of the future system, the agency called on the Quebec startup Mantle Technology (Montreal), which has an office in Strasbourg. Founded in 2017 and specializing in data protection, this company has developed an innovative "distributed storage" solution that differs from redundancy backup: "The data is fragmented, and each fragment is stored separately at a host. Not all fragments are necessary to reconstruct the initial data, which increases resilience," explains telecoms engineer Guillaume Joerger, in charge of digital solutions at Grand Est Développement.

After more than three years of gestation, the project entered the final stretch this summer. Since the end of June, Mantle has been installing dedicated software at eight partner IT services companies and operators (*). "There are eight of them, seven French and one Dutch. All have one or more data centers in the Grand Est region where the data fragments will be hosted," summarizes Guillaume Joerger.

A test phase is planned for the fall. If all goes well, the regional sovereign hosting offer will be operational and commercialized by early 2026. Until then, the Region and partner companies will still need to refine the economic model. "It will have to be transparent and competitive so that many regional communities and SMEs sign up for a subscription," insists Guillaume Joerger. A specific label, he adds, "will help identify this new solution and thus make it visible."

(*) The project’s partner operators are Adista (Maxéville), Alekso (Le Plessis Robinson), Advanced Mediomatrix (Peltre), Data-Sup (Metz), Hexanet (Reims), Ikoula (Paris), SDV (Strasbourg) and nLighten (Amsterdam).