The government wants to succeed by the end of the year in removing Microsoft from hosting the large public health data warehouse for research, a further sign of a growing desire to break free from American tech giants.
Starting Monday, a procedure will be launched to find a new host for the Health Data Hub, the three ministries of Health, State Reform and Digital Affairs announced on Friday.
This hosting provider will be chosen from among cloud computing operators certified by SecNumCloud. This certification guarantees security against any external interference with data, and effectively excludes American giants.
The government wants to achieve a total transfer of the platform "by the end of 2026", according to the ministries.
Launched in 2019, the health data platform will eventually contain a copy of all the health insurance data on the French, making it a veritable treasure trove for researchers and artificial intelligence engines.
It has been hosted on Microsoft's cloud since its inception. This choice had provoked anger from the outset among French players in the sector, and among defenders of civil liberties, worried about the risk of interference by American authorities in this data.
US law does indeed allow the country's administration to demand that American cloud providers hand over the data they hold, anywhere in the world.
The CNIL, guardian of the digital freedoms of the French, also requested, without success so far, that the government quickly designate a European hosting provider.
"Since Trump's second presidency, things have started to move" among political leaders on the issue of digital independence, commented a French digital industry player on Friday who wished to remain anonymous.
"I would say the breakthrough happened last summer," when Trump expressed his views on Venezuela and Greenland, he continued. "There was a real acceleration" at that time.
– “Awareness” –
"Political leaders are saying to themselves, 'What if the situation worsens, and if Trump cuts off our access to software, how do we ensure business continuity?'" in the French economy, the source indicated.
“Digital sovereignty”, or the ability to control data and its use, “is a topic that is becoming important”, says Vendée MP Philippe Latombe (Ensemble), who has been advocating for this cause for years.
"I would have preferred that political leaders had become aware earlier" of the importance of the issue, but the transfer of the Health Data Hub "is good news," he told AFP.
There are few players likely to succeed Microsoft.
Among the operators qualified as SecNumCloud by Anssi, the guardian of French computer security, are the French players OVH, Cloud Temple, and S3ns (read "Sens"), an operator formed by the French group Thales but which uses Google's "cloud" technology.
Orange, which partnered with Capgemini to leverage Microsoft's cloud technology, has applied for SecNumCloud certification. However, it has not yet formally obtained it, according to multiple sources.
Other signs of the government's desire to move away from non-European digital tools include the announcement on Thursday by Bercy of an upcoming circular imposing technological sovereignty as one of the primary criteria for public procurement of digital products and services.
At the end of January, the minister in charge of state reform, David Amiel, called for "getting out of dependence on American tools" and announced the generalization, by 2027, of a French "100%" videoconferencing solution within the administration, called Visio.
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