2.6 Industrial Cloud Platforms

The growing number of industrial cloud platforms will also drive the need for a standard for data sovereignty. With a lot of different platforms emerging -- driven by technology providers, software companies, system integrators, but also existing intermediaries -- it is very likely that the platform landscape will be very heterogeneous, at least for some time. Platform providers will increasingly have to provide capabilities for secure and trusted data exchange and data sharing between their own platform and other platforms in the ecosystem.

Furthermore, the cloud platform landscape is likely to be characterized by a plurality of architectural patterns, ranging from approaches characterized by a high level of centralization (e.g. data lakes) to concepts promoting utmost decentralization (e.g. distributed applications using blockchain technology).

Which platform a data owner or data provider may choose will depend on the business criticality and the economic value of the data goods they want to exchange and share. As the data resource of a company consists of data of different criticality and value, it can be expected that many companies will use different platforms for different purposes.

To make use of cloud platforms in industrial cases and to maintain data sovereignty, several preconditions must be fulfilled (especially in use cases in which different data providers bring together data in one cloud environment for being analyzed or used). The sovereign decision on a certain cloud environment must be enabled by interoperability from the perspective of data and from the perspective of the underlying software (i.e., portability of a service into different cloud environments). In addition, the capabilities of the service and the runtime must be transparent and verifiable to establish trust in the cloud environment to be used. To achieve and maintain interoperability and trust among the parties connected via a cloud environment, a governance model must be established and enforced with regard to technology, operational and administrative processes, and legal agreements.