Supervisors urge faster digital autonomy for vital processes
Dutch supervisory authorities, including DNB, urge faster action to strengthen digital autonomy. They call for increased control over digital dependencies to enhance the resilience of vital business processes.
The cost of digital dependence
Five Dutch supervisory authorities, including DNB, jointly advocate for greater digital autonomy to boost resilience.
They warn against the growing dependence on a few non-European IT vendors, which creates concentration and systemic risks, particularly in the current geopolitical climate.
This reliance threatens the continuity and security of vital business processes.
Potential disruptions include outages, cyber incidents, or political pressure leading to data access demands under foreign laws like the US CLOUD Act.
Vendor lock-in exacerbates these issues, making switching providers difficult and costly, thereby weakening negotiating positions.
For public authorities and financial institutions, this dependency directly impacts service provision.
Despite national strategies promoting self-determination, dependencies continue to grow, reflecting a broader European trend.
The authorities emphasize the issue's critical nature for their mandates, citing concerns under DORA and GDPR for system stability and consumer protection.
A collective path to greater control
To counter digital dependencies, the authorities recommend explicitly including digital autonomy as a quality criterion in IT services tendering and contract renewal.
This requires decision-making frameworks to set appropriate autonomy levels for each process, translated into verifiable requirements like data location, open standards, and adequate exit options.
The EU's Data Act can facilitate data portability.
Policymakers should ensure public authorities act as launch customers for European digital services, requiring a proportion of cloud demand to meet high sovereignty standards.
Legal requirements for European fallback options for vital processes are also proposed, alongside strengthening the investment environment for European IT providers.
A collective digital imperative
This joint position paper correctly identifies a critical, systemic vulnerability in Europe's digital infrastructure.
While the recommendations are practical and leverage existing legal frameworks, their effectiveness hinges on unprecedented cross-sectoral and cross-border coordination.
The true challenge lies in translating these urgent calls into concrete, sustained investment and a genuinely competitive European digital ecosystem.