Data Protection and Intellectual Property
Data sovereignty is indispensable for the protection of intellectual property. Manufacturing companies today exchange enormous quantities of sensitive data – from CAD models, simulation data, and software versions through bills of materials to production and operating data. As a result, there is a great danger that confidential data will be passed on uncontrolled and end up in the wrong hands. It is a balancing act because modern product development is highly collaborative: OEMs, development partners, and suppliers have to share data and at the same time be able to control who may use them for which purposes. Too much control hampers collaboration, and too little creates risks.
Companies have to learn which data are critical, which can be shared, and how they can ensure governance with reasonable effort. On the one hand, this requires powerful collaboration solutions. PROSTEP not only offers a proven solution for secure data exchange, but also supports, with its Digital Thread Platform, the automatic creation of Digital Data Packages (DDP), in which product information from different backend systems – together with the relationships between them – can be made available in neutral formats and in machine-readable form.
On the other hand, and this is more difficult to achieve, the parties involved have to align their different interests and trust one another. In supply networks, the parties involved often pursue different goals: the OEMs demand maximum transparency, the suppliers want to protect their know-how, and the platform operators want to bind their customers to them over the long term.
An end-to-end Digital Thread only works if data remain traceable and controllable over their entire lifecycle. Without data sovereignty, it becomes difficult to validate data sources, to ensure traceability, and to supply digital twins across company boundaries with operating data, without which they remain a digital zombie. At the same time, when passing on data, companies have to comply with ever stricter regulatory requirements such as the European Data Act, the Cyber Resilience Act, or industry-specific compliance requirements such as EU MDR and IEC 62304 in medical technology, A_SPICE in the automotive industry, or ITAR and AS9100 in the aerospace industry.
System Openness and Sovereignty
But the challenges of data sovereignty extend far beyond the data themselves. Many companies find that, although they formally own their data, they can only make limited use of them because their IT landscapes are not as open as the vendors like to claim. Proprietary data models, closed software architectures, and functionally limited interfaces have the consequence that the data can only be migrated, integrated, or used across systems with considerable effort. At PROSTEP, we know this situation very well. The problem is that, with the trend toward cloudification and rental models, PLM systems in particular have not necessarily become more open. This was one of the insights from the workshop on the topic of PLM Openness at this year’s prostep ivip Symposium.
Data sovereignty thus inevitably also becomes a question of openness. A robust Digital Thread can only emerge if information can flow between PLM, ALM, ERP, MES, and IoT systems without friction losses. As long as proprietary interfaces and incompatible data models dominate the system landscapes, digital continuity often ends where it should actually begin: at the boundaries of the individual applications and platforms.
Infrastructure as the third Dimension
Added to this is a third dimension of data sovereignty that is becoming increasingly important in Europe: dependence on non-European digital infrastructures. A large part of digitalization is today based on the cloud and platform services of the global hyperscalers. This creates enormous efficiency gains, but at the same time raises the question of who controls these digital infrastructures and according to which rules access to the data takes place – or who may, by decree, be able to obtain access to those data.
All the more so as control over the AI technology that is increasingly being used to generate added value from these data also lies in the hands of a few global tech corporations.
Europe’s efforts to date to become more sovereign have created an impressive body of rules. The challenge now consists of translating this body of rules across the board into trustworthy data spaces. Catena-X is one of the few productive lighthouse projects. Above all, alongside bodies of rules, we need the corresponding infrastructures – that is, strong European cloud providers. Fortunately, there are signs that things are starting to move on the scene. STACKIT, a company that belongs to the digital division of the Schwarz Group and was one of the sponsors of this year’s prostep ivip Symposium, is currently building up a sovereign European cloud infrastructure.
PROSTEP addresses all three Dimensions
At PROSTEP, we take the topic of data sovereignty very seriously and, with our Digital Thread Platform, address all three dimensions of data sovereignty: the protection of data and intellectual property through our secure data exchange solution; the improvement of cross-system information flows and the creation of a robust Digital Thread through our standards-based integration technology; and the connection of any enterprise systems to trustworthy data spaces. As a result, data can be shared with partners in the value chain while observing clearly defined rules of engagement.
