BIT’s Cristiaan Brans-Jansen and Wido Potters about ECOFED: “We’re not just building for the present, but also for the future”

Try developing a protocol that lets different cloud technologies communicate seamlessly with one another, even technologies that don’t exist yet. The aim: to facilitate a large and open federated cloud. That’s precisely what the ECOFED project seeks to achieve, and it’s something that the engineers at BIT are genuinely excited about.

In the ECOFED project, five Dutch companies are collaborating on a credible alternative to hyperscaler cloud services. They are developing technical protocols that make it possible interconnect different cloud services. The result is an open and federated cloud in which all (European) providers of cloud technology can participate, provided they adopt the protocol. BIT is one of the companies in this consortium.

A Breeding Ground for Innovation

BIT is an independent IT service provider with three own data centres in Ede. The company is still owned by its founders. It operates with a flat organisational structure in which everyone is equal and can put forward ideas without having to pass through multiple layers of management. This makes BIT a breeding ground for innovation. The approximately forty engineers employed by BIT possess highly specialised technical expertise, and as a result they frequently come up with ideas for doing things differently. “Our company culture and structure stimulate innovation.” says Cristiaan Brans-Jansen, project leader for ECOFED at BIT. “Every engineer enjoys trying new things. At BIT, you’re given the space to do so. Something always comes of it.”

Groundbreaking Technology

This explains why BIT’s engineers are so keen to participate in ECOFED. Brans-Jansen’s colleague Wido Potters (Manager of Support & Sales) originally introduced BIT to the four other organisations that now form the ECOFED consortium. Four of the five had previously been involved in Structura-X, a Gaia-X initiative aimed at reducing Europe’s dependence on American cloud providers. In that project, multiple containers located at physically separate sites were virtually interconnected using an existing protocol (Liqo), in line with the Gaia-X framework.

Where Structura-X was limited to container technologies, ECOFED is far broader: any cloud technology should be able to become part of the open and federated cloud, including technologies that don’t exist yet. And whereas Structura-X aimed merely to demonstrate that Liqo could enable containers across different clouds to work together, ECOFED’s objective is to develop technologies that enable federation across the entire cloud stack. “ECOFED is therefore many times larger, more complex, and riskier,” says Potters. “That is also why we receive funding through an EU programme (IPCEI-CIS)”

The Red Button

Despite this, BIT is willing to take on the risk, for several reasons, Potters explains. “First and foremost, BIT has long warned about the risks of excessive dependence on a small number of American hyperscalers. That’s the reason we joined Structura-X five years ago, and why we’re now participating in ECOFED.”
For most ISPs, this only became a pressing issues when SIDN announced its move to Amazon Web Services. The announced acquisition of Solvinity (responsible for managing DigiD) by an American company brought the issue into the public domain. Bert Hubert has also raised the topic politically through his blogs and extensive network; it’s now even referenced in the coalition agreement.

Potters: “A few years ago, we could only dream of this level of attention. We were already highlighting the risks of dependence on a handful of American companies ten years ago, because the outlines of today’s market were already becoming visible then. But at the time, we received a lot of blank stares. People thought it’d be fine, that international law would provide sufficient protection against the danger of someone in the US pressing the big red button and shutting down services. Only when that actually happened, when Microsoft denied an International Criminal Court prosecutor access to their email, did people realise it’s not just a theoretical risk. Hyperscalers can, in practice, press that red button.”

Restoring Resilience

Another reason for participating in ECOFED is that BIT sees the project as an opportunity to restore resilience in cloud services. Potters: “The internet originally developed as a network of networks. Over the past decade, there’s been increasing centralisation, with the result that individuals and businesses have become dependent on a shrinking number of providers for their internet services. That creates risk, because these parties have become highly attractive targets for hackers. Just look at what happened at Odido. Once inside, attackers can steal the data of vast numbers of people, or bring entire services to a standstill. When you consider that all Dutch municipalities rely on Microsoft’s services, you can imagine the scale of the damage if those services were disrupted by a hack.”

A Diverse European Market

To prevent governments and businesses from becoming entirely dependent on just a handful of American cloud service providers, it’s paramount to have a sufficient number of strong European providers. “The more diverse the European market, the bigger the chance that European organisations will source their services within Europe,” says Brans-Jansen.

Such diversity also stimulates innovation, he adds. “Having only a few providers stifles innovation. That’s a fundamental market principle. For that reason alone, you want a diverse ecosystem.”

A key condition is that procuring cloud services within such a diverse ecosystem should be just as straightforward and user-friendly as it is with a hyperscaler. That’s exactly what the ECOFED project aims to achieve. Brans-Jansen: “In Europe, we have a rich and colourful patchwork of organisations developing excellent solutions based on their own technological strengths. But they are typically small and focused on only one part of the market. If ECOFED succeeds, those smaller organisations can collaborate within an ecosystem that returns to the internet’s original design: open and federated. We will then be able to offer citizens and businesses a larger range of options, which are also easy to adopt. That’s a win-win for both cloud providers and users: citizens, businesses and governments. Competition delivers greater innovation at lower cost, and ISPs together create a larger market because there’s no longer any need to go to an American hyperscaler.”