On March 6, defence minister François Bausch presented the draft law for the €250m project which will take place from 2024 until 2035 with the support of NATO and will play a crucial role in Luxembourg’s future cybersecurity projects.
This announcement follows the bill first presented by minister Bausch on 23 February this year and expands on Luxembourg’s cybersecurity strategy published in February 2021. While no doubt expensive, the project is also part of Luxembourg’s efforts to fulfil its NATO obligations of increasing its defence spending to 1% of its GDP by 2028.
The construction of the project will allow users of the Luxembourg Cyber Defence Cloud (LCDC) to access classified and unclassified data through a network of remote servers hosted in secure data centers in Luxembourg. The project will meet the highest international standards and as a private cloud will only be accessible on a private network and not via the internet.
“The LCDC will play a crucial role in the implementation of Luxembourg’s future projects in the cyber field and will thus contribute to our strategic objective which is to build one of the most cyber-secure defences. By making this future cutting-edge capacity available to reliable partners, Luxembourg will make a significant contribution to the common effort in terms of collective defence at the EU and NATO level”, explained François Bausch.
Some of the other advantages include reduced costs and environmental footprint, ease of scalability, as well as increased levels of reliability, productivity and security. Additionally, Luxembourg’s “Cyber Range”, a training environment for the continuous training of cyber experts, can also be hosted on the new LCDC.
Considering the scope of the project, the NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) is stepping in to support Luxembourg in setting up this massive project. Next to this support, the NSPA is also likely to migrate its own private cloud with the LCDC.
“With the LCDC, Luxembourg will have a capacity that it can make available to its Allies and national and international partners to respond to [security and digital transformation] challenges, the importance of which will continue to grow.”
For more information on the project, see here.
