On 6 July 2022, Senators Sophie PRIMAS, Amel GACQUERRE and Franck MONTAUGÉ published an information report on behalf of the Economic Affairs Committee on France’s economic sovereignty.

This report is structured around five thematic plans to “rebuild the economic sovereignty of France and Europe”. The 3^rd theme of the report considers sovereignty through investment in the skills and jobs of tomorrow (pages 150-183).

In its development, the authors of the report evoke different avenues of work to train in Cloud professions by developing, for example, the offer of professional certifications registered with France Competences by French actors. The Americans Microsoft and Amazon Web Services have already referenced several certifying training courses with the professional training regulatory authority, which allows beneficiaries and companies to obtain support for training costs.

This Senate proposal is in line with the work of École Hexagone within GINUM, where we are working to propose a “Digital Sovereignty” label by the end of 2022, among other things on the training side, in close collaboration with French-European software and industrial publishers such as Stormshield and Outscale, to name but a few.

The senatorial information report concludes this section on skills “In order to limit the influence of Gafam on the supply of skills for young graduates and professionals, it is essential to supplement the national offers of initial and continuing training allowing them to acquire sufficient theoretical, technical and methodological knowledge to work on a wide range of networks and information systems, on behalf of companies as well as for public authorities.”. This recommendation is fully in line with the position of the École Hexagone, which since its creation has been campaigning for digital sovereignty from initial training (post-Baccalaureate studies).

In addition, the authors also propose the granting of Cloud credits to start-ups, by French players such as Outscale, Scaleway, OVH, etc. on the same model successfully implemented by American suppliers. Sébastien DHÉRINES, President of École Hexagone, pointed out in a previous column published in Le Figaro this pressure from GAFAM, “The startup is growing with the services of the provider. Once the free period is over, she becomes captive to it, reversibility being difficult insofar as the priorities are elsewhere. If this young shoot raises funds of one million euros, we can estimate that 5 to 20% is captured by an American cloud player.”.