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Practical example and current challenges

  • Digital sovereignty means being able to decide for yourself what happens to your own data. Self-responsibility and self-governance become more important in this context. This means that not only individuals, but also public administrations, face the challenge of protecting the confidentiality of their communications and digital activities.
  • The federal, state, and municipalities have set themselves the goal of continuously strengthening the digital sovereignty of public administration in its various roles as user, provider and customer of digital technologies. In particular, services from cloud providers based in the European Union can help to process the sensitive and valuable data of the public sector securely and in accordance with European data protection regulations, and to reduce dependence on large global tech companies.
  • The Phoenix use case leverages this and offers a flexible, secure, and sovereign solution for the web-based digital workplace in public administration. Phoenix is based on open source software and thus guarantees the digital sovereignty of municipalities and other public institutions such as schools and cultural institutions. Phoenix describes a fully functional and virtual workplace (mail, calendar, contacts, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, file sharing, video conferencing, etc.) developed on the basis of open source modules and operated in secure data centers of public IT service providers and in secured clouds. Phoenix works with open source code, which, unlike other providers, is freely accessible. This transparency ensures that users retain control over their data. In addition, the strict data protection guidelines of the DSGVO apply. Phoenix's servers are located in Germany.
  • The target group for the digital workplace is the public administration or other sectors that want to ensure special confidentiality, such as the healthcare sector. However, the solution is basically open to everyone, including the private sector, e.g. in the context of secure corporate communications.

Infografik: AgriML

What added value does the "Gaia-X project" offer?

  • The open interfaces of Gaia-X and the planned standardization enable a high degree of automation for Phoenix and thus a fast time-to-market, elastic scaling for diverse environment sizes, and pay-per-use models for user groups of different sizes. Phoenix can be tailored precisely to the needs of users. This makes it a sustainable and future-proof investment for public institutions.
  • Phoenix claims to be able to operate in any data center as a blueprint to achieve the broadest possible distribution and high user numbers. This distributed data center approach is supported by the Gaia-X vision.
  • Gaia-X addresses important topics such as federation, compliance, interoperability, interfaces, identity management or migration concepts. These elements also play a central role in Phoenix - thus creating synergy effects and joint added value. Together, both initiatives pursue the vision of securing the digital sovereignty of the government.
  • The use in the public sector and the resulting security and trust gained when using Phoenix components based on Gaia-X are a useful reference that can be transferred to other domains. Phoenix can also be used in other Gaia-X domains.

Use Case Team

  • Tina Siegfried – Dataport