DREAM

Cloud applications open up new possibilities for collaboration and flexibility for businesses, but they also present challenges—particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises—in terms of cybersecurity, data protection, and vendor lock-in. It is therefore crucial for companies to develop strategies to strengthen their digital sovereignty in order to use cloud technologies securely and in compliance with the law, and to future-proof their IT infrastructure. In the “DREAM” project, researchers aim to develop innovative solutions for the secure and sovereign use of decentralized architectures and technologies in the cloud. The project is based on the concept of decentralized data rooms, in which data can be securely stored in decentralized infrastructures provided by various vendors, while control remains consistently and exclusively with the respective owner. Through virtual integration, these distributed data sources are interconnected in such a way that they appear to users as a single central data space—without requiring centralized storage. At the core of this approach is the development of a technical middle layer that significantly simplifies the operation and use of decentralized architectures. The goal is to meet the highest standards for data sovereignty, confidentiality, integrity, and availability while simultaneously enabling a significantly more flexible switch between different cloud providers than with conventional solutions. The technology in question offers an innovative solution for the efficient management and storage of billions of small files in distributed data systems. It thus addresses key challenges such as data fragmentation and complex migration processes, which are becoming increasingly relevant even for small businesses with growing data volumes. This opens up significant market opportunities for cloud providers, hosting service providers, and data centers that can offer powerful, flexible, and cost-effective storage solutions for data-intensive industries such as healthcare and the financial sector