Chief Executive Officer, Orange Business (and EVP, Orange Group), Orange Business
TECHNOLOGIES & SOUVERAINETÉ NUMÉRIQUE 2022 / ORANGE BUSINESS SERVICES - VISION DE CEO & INTERVIEW
ORANGE BUSINESS SERVICES - VISION DE CEO & INTERVIEW / Data & Cloud: l’écosystème « Cloud de confiance »
Intervenants :
Aliette Mousnier-Lompré : Directrice Générale - Orange Business Services
Nassima Auvray : Directrice Stratégie & Marketing des solutions Could de confiance - Orange Business Services
Marion Moreau : Journalise
About Aliette Mousnier-lompre
Aliette Mousnier-Lompré, CEO of Orange Business, stated in June 2025 that the company has built France’s first commercial quantum network, describing it as a "totally inviolable" system. She warned that a state capable of decrypting global data would gain a "huge competitive advantage," arguing that organizations must begin protecting against the coming quantum threat. In earlier interviews, she said Orange Business was on track with a plan to transform from a B2B telco player into a "leading European network and digital integrator," and that the company was targeting acquisitions in cybersecurity in Europe. She described sustainability as a "selection criteria" in customer tenders, noting that discussion of carbon emissions had become common in client meetings. In 2022 and 2023, Mousnier-Lompré said enterprise customers sought more "resilience, predictability, and reversibility" in their digital infrastructure. She argued that trust and sovereignty were central to Orange Business’s strategy, but cautioned against a "protectionist logic," advocating for an open yet controlled European data approach. She also said that generative AI was driving customer demand for data governance and infrastructure upgrades, as enterprises attempted to "embrace the new opportunities" of the technology.
Transcript (35 segments)
A
Aliette Mousnier-lompre0:00
Hello everyone. I would like to start by thanking Netexplo and Télécom Paris for their observatory and their work on digital sovereignty technologies. Given its activities and its very reason for being, Orange Business Services is deeply invested in these matters, and we know how essential it is to organize collective reflection in confidence to accelerate the emergence of a sovereign ecosystem that we all, I think, wish for. We approach digital sovereignty from probably different angles, and that is what makes our exchanges rich. We also need to find common convictions, a common drive.
The mission of Orange Business Services is to support our clients, companies and public organizations, in their digital transformation along three main axes: the work environment, the customer or citizen relationship, and industrial excellence. We provide integrated services built on secure digital infrastructures and on the valorization and use of data.
For some of our clients in France or elsewhere, it is essential to call on a partner capable of implementing trusted or sovereign digital services, because they have obligations to the state, to certain sensitive clients, and also to citizens. We are seeing increasing sensitivity to these issues with the pandemic and its butterfly effect, or the war in Ukraine.
The challenge for our clients is first and foremost to remain in control of their choices and their digital dependencies. This means they expect guarantees from us regarding our services on a regulatory level, a technical, organizational, and operational level, as well as in terms of image and reputation. The value of these guarantees is measured pragmatically through specific criteria: transparency, confidentiality, reversibility, availability, and strict compliance with French and European law.
Finally, I would like to stress the absolute necessity of taking a European approach when it comes to digital sovereignty. That is why Orange Business Services is involved in numerous initiatives driven in particular by the European Commission, in order to be a driving force on the regulatory front.
The development of sovereign solutions is an obvious factor of competitiveness, as they allow us to respond to a growing demand from our clients to create value in confidence through all the technologies we deploy: networks, connected objects, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, the cloud, and more.
That said, we must be careful not to lock ourselves into a protectionist logic. We operate in a global ecosystem. Our challenge is not to shut ourselves off from global innovation, but to find commercial, technical, and regulatory levers to impose a certain vision of the digital world that remains open while guaranteeing data protection, interoperability, and transparency.
We also need to prepare for the new evolution underway, namely the rise of edge computing, which also raises the question of competitiveness and sovereignty for European actors. In this regard, the work we participate in as part of the important European common interest project GAIA-X with other European partners seems essential to us.
I will not elaborate on our strategy around the cloud and sovereignty, since our director of strategy for trusted cloud solutions, Nassima Auvray, will have the opportunity to do so live with you.
Beyond the cloud, cybersecurity is obviously also a key element of our strategy. Cyber is part of the DNA of our networks and services, and we constantly seek to anticipate cyber threats that are evolving very, very quickly.
Finally, the future of digital will depend in part on mastering data. If at the start of our society's digitalization the bulk of data was generated by individual and domestic uses, we now observe a shift in data volumes towards industry, and in the near future we expect the majority of data to come from the industrial world. That is why Orange supports the development and implementation of a European data strategy. It is imperative to enable the emergence of a strong and resilient European ecosystem in data economy, while respecting our values.
M
Moderator4:31
And so let's talk about this trusted cloud in this sequence with you, Nassima Auvray. Welcome. Your title could be summarized as Director of Strategy and Marketing for Cloud Solutions at Orange Business Services, but these are trusted cloud solutions. So let's talk a bit about this trusted cloud. What do we mean by trusted cloud? What do we mean by digital trust?
N
Nassima Auvray4:57
So first of all, as we saw and as you just said, there has been enormous debate in recent months and even years around the notion of trusted cloud. Often in my title, I put it in quotation marks because the government recently proposed in its cloud doctrine a trusted cloud label. What I would like to say before sharing Orange Business Services' vision on this notion of trusted cloud is that this is a notion with variable geometry, and we see that there are different definitions and approaches around it.
So if we go back to the fundamentals, what is the cloud? The cloud is above all a network of physical infrastructures connected to each other, which has servers, and these servers are designed to process and exploit data or run applications. There is no doubt that the cloud is a real opportunity. We all need it today, businesses need it, it is a vector of innovation. And at the same time, the cloud is also potentially a bearer of dangers, threats, and risks, because as I was saying, we end up entrusting our data to a physical and software environment that does not belong to us, that belongs to a third party.
And so the notion of a trusted third party is important here. There is potentially the risk of no longer controlling the future of this data, or even the risk of having it exploited without our knowledge, or of not being able to go back sometimes once we have engaged in certain functionalities. The notion of reversibility is quite important when talking about data control. The need for a trusted cloud is really about being able to control the future of these data, and I would even say there is a final nuance: being able to make informed choices about the level of dependency one wishes to grant regarding this data sharing.
For Orange Business Services, a trusted cloud, or digital trust in the cloud, is about being able to provide our clients with guarantees on key criteria that will depend on their needs and their context. A multinational luxury company will not necessarily have the same expectations, needs, or strategy when it comes to cloud as a critical infrastructure operator in the energy sector. The idea is really to be able to provide guarantees on these criteria, which include security criteria, regulatory criteria related to data protection, but also criteria related to immunity from extraterritorial jurisdiction, data center localization, and more.
M
Moderator7:56
From Orange Business Services' point of view, let's perhaps talk about the levers for a trusted cloud. How do we identify them today?
N
Nassima Auvray8:09
The levers are multiple. First, I would like to make a clarification. It's quite interesting because sometimes people talk about digital sovereignty in the cloud, sometimes about digital trust. I would tend to speak more of digital trust, since the term digital sovereignty is a strong term that does not have a legal definition today. Some consider that digital sovereignty is nothing other than the sovereignty of a state and the continuity of a state's sovereignty in cyberspace, but you still need to define the limits of that cyberspace.
Others, when talking about cloud, consider that sovereignty in the cloud means being able to control all value chains of the cloud, from the very lowest layers, and then you need to see how deep you go, down to chips, components, up to the highest layers. So I prefer to speak of digital trust, and its levers are multiple: regulatory levers, operational and organizational levers, and technological levers with various data protection measures.
So the levers of the moment include, for example, choosing a trusted provider rather than a foreign one. We all have those names in mind. But the lever may also be on the medium to long term. We know today that many companies work with foreign actors because they are dominant on the cloud market. But the question is whether your clients would not benefit today from making a turn towards envisaging the ownership of their data in the future.
So already, to put it in perspective, today 80% of the cloud market is occupied by the hyperscalers. That is enormous. We think of course of Amazon, Google with GCP, and Azure from Microsoft. Furthermore, these players invest billions of euros in R&D, so they have an immense head start, and they built their history over more than twenty years. Their cloud offerings have been around for a very long time.
So we see that in the cloud offerings proposed today, there is an immense firepower with very interesting solutions. Many of our clients rely on these technologies, because we should clarify that not all data is sensitive. I think we also need to do this work, which is what we encourage our clients to do: take the time to identify which data is strategic and should not leave the national territory.
When we talk about strategic data, that can also be intellectual property data, financial data. That is the first point. What we then propose is to support our clients with measures that are the most adapted to the sensitivity level of their data and their needs. There is also the regulatory lever, as you mentioned.
M
Moderator11:37
Are you the spokesperson for all the European Commission's initiatives to regulate what is done in our space?
N
Nassima Auvray11:51
We are invested, Orange Business Services is involved in the various promising initiatives that already exist at the European Commission level. There was the Digital Services Act recently, the Digital Markets Act. We are involved, for example, in the Data Act, because it can potentially have an impact on how operators like Orange Business Services operate. So yes, we are very involved.
When people say the battle for the sovereign European cloud is lost, I think from the data angle it is not lost at all. We already have numerous regulatory levers with a very active European Commission. We've seen the GDPR and all the devices I mentioned. There is also know-how and expertise in France and Europe on cutting-edge technologies such as blockchain. So taking the question of digital trust in the cloud from the data angle is also a point that will be developed in the years to come.
M
Moderator13:02
Earlier your director mentioned edge computing a little bit. Can we come back to this notion of edge computing? First its definition, so that we all understand what it is, and what are the challenges of sovereign edge computing?
N
Nassima Auvray13:17
Edge computing is simply about bringing computing power as close as possible to the user, in order to process data as close as possible to the object that generates this data. The interest is to reduce latency. If we take the example of the autonomous vehicle of tomorrow, and suppose it needs to trigger emergency braking measures, we can clearly see that it needs to process data as quickly as possible. So edge computing is interesting. It relies on technologies like 5G, which enables low latency.
And so alongside that, from the moment we multiply what we could call a network of micro data centers, we can see that each one represents a vulnerability, an open door to potential attacks and hacking. So the whole challenge of digital trust and sovereignty on the edge is to ensure total protection and tightness of data across these various data centers.
M
Moderator14:24
We were talking about data in the broad sense. Should we differentiate between the sovereignty of personal data and industrial data? I imagine not, it's all data. But you note that there are categories of data that are less sensitive than others.
N
Nassima Auvray14:39
Yes, absolutely.
M
Moderator14:41
If we look at our assets now and for tomorrow, hoping that sovereignty is also a driver of competitiveness and not just a protective barrier, is the future not in industrial data? We were just talking about the ecosystem with EDF and industrial players. What is your position on industrial data as an area where we can still win in Europe?
N
Nassima Auvray15:08
Absolutely, and that's what I said earlier. In the digitalization of our society, originally it was rather personal and domestic data that was generated in the largest volumes. We are seeing a reversal of this trend in the coming years, with really big data and the explosion of industrial data. I spoke about the autonomous vehicle, and today we are surrounded by connected objects that handle enormous amounts of data, and these volumes of data will constitute a real potential for industry.
If you look at the various publications from the European Commission, the Commission considers that today about 80% of data is generated, stored, and processed in data centers and clouds. The trend should reverse by 2025, notably with edge computing that we just discussed. Connected objects, the Internet of Things, will explode the number of sensors, even if IoT forecasts are quite debated. But this is clearly an interesting avenue, particularly with a trusted cloud logic to build around the explosion of this data.
M
Moderator16:40
Thank you very much, Nassima.