The Croatian IT company APIS IT is hosting a two-day strategic meeting of EURITAS, a European organization of public IT service providers for public administration from eight European countries, which will take place on Thursday and Friday in Split. The aim of the meeting, which features companies and organizations from Austria, Denmark, Finland, Croatia, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, is to define objectives for the next two-year period following the election of new EURITAS leadership in March.
EURITAS is an organization representing 11 IT companies that are predominantly publicly owned and focused on the needs of public administration in their countries. Together, they employ 27,000 people and provide services used by over 113 million European citizens. In addition to providing services to the public sector and maintaining critical IT infrastructure, the organization’s primary task at the EU level is to strengthen the digital sovereignty of public administration, ensuring technological independence from large non-European suppliers and control over the data of their own citizens.
Digital sovereignty is today a matter of paramount importance for the EU, considering that more than 90 percent of data from the Western world is stored on servers owned by companies outside the EU that are not subject to European data protection laws, while at the same time, none of the top 20 largest tech companies are from the EU. This state of affairs and dependence on monopolistic suppliers who do not adhere to European rules is a clear strategic weakness of the EU, recognized by the European Commission, which will promote the strengthening of digital sovereignty through a series of investments and measures at the Union level in the next budgetary period. Control over data, as well as hardware and software, is not only an important economic issue but also a top-tier social and security issue at the EU level, which was also the focus of last year’s EURITAS summit held in Brussels.
