‘Thanks to a fruitful collaboration with the Luxembourg authorities, the Commission is today opening a world class datacentre to ensure its IT infrastructure which is operating EU and pan-European Information systems, is modern, reliable and cost-efficient’ Commissioner Oettinger said.

The Datacentre will be housing more than 1400 information systems such as pan-European systems supporting the Single Market, climate policy, health and food safety or structural funds. It will also house internal systems, which help run the Commission’s administration, such as its financial and HR systems.

The Betzdorf datacentre will be a datacentre of the future enhanced by cloud services and which is energy efficient, flexible, agile and secure at the same time.  The move to the Betzdorf datacentre completes the Commission’s move out of the old Jean Monnet building where asbestos had been detected in 2014.

Thanks to this move the consolidation of the Commission's data centres will be made easier by including more than 30 local data rooms in two professional Luxembourg-based Tier-4 data centres. This consolidation will on the one hand improve the reliability and security of EU information systems and data, and on the other hand reduce business continuity risks and save resources.

Background

After the detection of asbestos in the JMO building in 2014, European Commission and Luxembourg authorities worked closely together to find solutions to rehouse Luxembourg-based Commission services and enable them to continue to operate in Luxembourg under the best conditions. Commission Vice-President Kristallina Georgieva, and the Luxemburgish Minister of Foreign and European Affairs, Jean Asselborn, found a global agreement in 2015. It covers the reinforcement of the Commission's  presence in Luxembourg and the Grand Duchy's help in relocating both staff and the data centre from the contaminated Jean Monnet building to new premises. A Digital Pole, with the transfer of posts, units and directorates from DG DIGIT and DG CONNECT to Luxembourg was initiated and has already started to take shape.

The Digital Pole will act as a magnet for policy and implementation and be a service centre for the entire EU. It will be an open platform for reflection on EU digital policy shaping and showcase 'touch and feel' digital solutions. Finally, it will provide operational digital service infrastructure support to Member States and data analytics expertise.

The Digital Pole will promote policies and innovative solutions for digitizing health, wellbeing and ageing, public services, education, language and culture. It will be a policy, service and investment facility for European digital infrastructures and technologies (e.g. super-computing, data centres, robotics), the European data economy (e.g. the Open Data Portal and data analytics), public service innovation and modernisation (e.g. eGovernment, interoperability, digital trust).