I’ve been spending a bit of time looking at the Gaia-X project out of the EU to better understand how they see the data ecosystems in the EU evolving, and what reference architectures would look like for market participants. The question becomes, what capabilities do market participants need to have to participate in the ecosystem (and satisfy their responsibilities). Here is the list I came up with.

• Secrets Management
• Key Management
• Identity Federation Service
• Secure Posture Management
• Centralized Identity and Access Management
• Contract Management
• Centralized Audit
• Document Version System
• Service Catalogue
• Data Exchange Service
• Secure Access Workstation
• Process Management (orchestration)
• API management service

Obviously there is a lot of variability in how much of each of these capabilities need to be built-out, and there is likely a role for a public cloud provider to satisfy a lot of the capability using cloud-native technologies.

What does this all mean? Not sure right now to be honest. The next steps would be to look at each service in turn, define it properly, and understand some target architectures for satisfying the capability.