Three candidates to become the cloud provider of public institutions

Paris (AFP)

The State will designate in December among three candidates the computer reseller responsible for providing public institutions - state services, local authorities ... - cloud services (cloud computing), was learned Friday concordant sources .

Three IT groups responded to the state's tender, Capgemni, SoftwareONE, and a combination of Atos and SCC, said the sources.

The reseller who will be chosen will propose to the administrations and the local authorities, via the Ugap, the central public purchase, cloud offers at a negotiated price, operated by a small dozen actors of the cloud.

US carriers - including AWS, Google and Microsoft - will be among the suppliers, such as French operators OVH, Scaleway or Outscale.

The final list will depend on the reseller selected by the state, as the three candidates do not have exactly the same offer.

The potential market for these services, which will only concern non-sensitive data, represents "from 350 to 450 million euros", according to an industrial source.

For the most strategic data, the state will use an internal cloud, managed by its own services on its own machines.

This internal cloud must be created in the course of 2020.

For data a little less sensitive, but which must be protected from unwanted looks, the State will use a "dedicated" cloud, managed by one or more operators, probably exclusively European, with a strict specifications.

The objective is to open this or these "dedicated" clouds in the first quarter of 2021.

The state and local communities do not want to stay away from the big movement of IT resources to the clouds.

These shared infrastructures, of which Amazon, Microsoft and Google are the world champions, make it possible to offer enormous computing and storage powers, which can be mobilized at will, often at a lower cost.

But the state also wants to secure its data as much as possible, especially in the face of the potential threat of the Cloud Act, a US law that allows US security agencies to requisition data from their customers from US cloud operators, wherever in the world these data are stored.

The Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire has recently added an additional cloud project, targeting this time the sensitive data of French and European companies.

The minister wants the creation of a "cloud of confidence" to accommodate this data, he said in Paris on October 3.

OVH and Outscale have been asked to work on this issue, said Le Mayor, who said that this offer of "cloud of confidence" could be formed in collaboration with Germany.

© 2019 AFP