It will be some time yet before the first sovereign cloud infrastructures become fully operational (e.g. in the case of the Delos Cloud, by mid-2025). Nevertheless, the public sector should not – and does not need to – wait that long. We are already supporting and empowering the public sector today so that it can develop its sovereign applications locally. After all, the traditional concept of sovereignty means that an organisation has control over its hardware, applications and data. The public sector must retain this control in the cloud as well, regardless of where the hardware, data and applications are located. It is essential to get public authorities on board with the mindset and preparatory work for the journey to the cloud right from the start.
Public sector organisations face this new challenge as they undertake the comprehensive cloudification of their infrastructure and applications. We call this ‘data governance’, i.e. the regulation of data sovereignty within an organisation: who has authority and control over which data sets, how is this data processed and by whom, and how can aspects of IT security and data protection – including in the cloud – be ensured. Data strategies and objectives must be established and processes defined. Furthermore, reference models and data structures must be specified, and policies governing the use of data must be defined. With the help of the modern data economy, data spaces are emerging that can be intelligently linked to form data ecosystems and managed accordingly.
GIS (Geographic Information Systems) solutions are also frequently an essential component of this data ecosystem. That is why it is important that we plan ahead for such systems today and implement them for our clients. There are already a number of examples of data spaces that integrate GIS and AI solutions to achieve better results, faster decision-making and an overall increase in efficiency by enabling management to incorporate spatial data references into their analyses (e.g. for situational overviews, for all kinds of planning and implementation processes, and to optimise resource allocation).
From practice: Geodata systems on the way to the sovereign cloud
Notable examples include intelligent administrative portals that operate at both federal and state levels and also involve local authorities and municipalities. This is only possible with a scalable solution, generative AI and a trusted cloud, where federal organisations can jointly access the data and utilise the systems and results across the board. Materna, for example, has already set up a landing zone on the Delos Cloud. This means that GIS applications can already be tested and used today at a pre-production development stage. We have also already trialled other applications.
Another example is sustainable traffic management. For Autobahn GmbH, Materna, together with partners, has developed the operating system that already functions at these preliminary stages of the sovereign cloud. This means it is based on the open-source system Kubernetes, the container orchestration system used to manage and automate ‘containerised’ applications and services, and to develop microservices quickly, across platforms and with high availability. GIS solutions from Esri are also integrated with the operating system. This means that behind the traffic management systems on the motorways there is already a cloud system in which traffic data is processed and aggregated.
A third example is civil protection. This is a federal responsibility, whilst disaster management is a state responsibility. In the various towns and local authorities, it is the police and fire services that are responsible for providing situational updates and information. If we want to interconnect these systems, we automatically come to the topic of multi-cloud. In future, it will not matter whether the system is hosted as a private cloud within an organisation, whether it is one of the sovereign clouds, or whether it is hosted in the public cloud by one of the well-known hyperscalers. Linking sovereign clouds with GIS solutions offers great opportunities in the future for speeding up administrative processes and, more generally, for providing faster, evidence- and data-driven solutions across multiple crisis scenarios.
We have launched another project this year: Forest Planning 4.0 is a forestry remote sensing project run by the Bavarian State Forests. Together with a European consortium of partners from the forestry sector, Materna will digitise almost the entire Bavarian State Forest, comprising around 800,000 hectares of woodland. The aim of this nine-year project is to use IT-supported forest management procedures, including AI technologies, to create a comprehensive map of the forest stand, from which measures for a more sustainable and climate-resilient forest can be derived. In future, drones will be used instead of aircraft to continuously provide remote sensing data. The underlying solutions must scale accordingly and be based on sovereign data structures.
Sovereignty therefore also means that we can securely interconnect data using data rooms and cloud systems. Materna acts as the interface between client requirements and new technological possibilities, combining administrative expertise with technological innovation to deliver new digital solutions for public administration.
More on the “Sovereign Cloud” series:
Part 1: The Sovereign Cloud drives
the digitalisation of public administration; Part 2: Ready for the Sovereign Cloud? Public sector data centres in the spotlight
Part 3 Cloudy with a chance of specialist procedures: How the Sovereign Cloud is revolutionising
public administration Part 4 New perspectives: GIS goes Sovereign Cloud
