GitHub, owned by Microsoft, said that 90% of the world's open source projects are stored on its code storage platform.
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MicrosoftOn Tuesday, GitHub, its developer platform, said it enables business users to limit the storage of their sensitive software code to data centers in the European Union.
The move is part of an effort to meet the European Union's strict data protection requirements and comes amid a broader political push for digital “sovereignty.”
The company said it will give GitHub Enterprise Cloud customers greater control over where their repository data is stored, with the option to only store data in Microsoft Azure-owned servers within the EU, rather than potentially Other countries where data protection exists.
Companies will be able to control the “data residency” of software code stored on GitHub – effectively meaning they can decide where the data is stored.
Enterprise users will be able to manage and control consumer accounts and choose unique namespaces specific to their company that are separate from their open source experience, GitHub said.
Enterprise users will also receive enhanced business continuity support and disaster recovery, which can assist in the event of any network breach or outage affecting physical server equipment.
GitHub Enterprise Cloud is the company's paid product available only to enterprises. Companies using its enterprise-focused tools tend to store closed-source (rather than open-source) software projects on the platform.
GitHub is primarily known as a destination for individual programmers and teams to create and store open source code. However, the company has been increasingly pursuing a business-to-business sales model, especially after being acquired by Microsoft in 2018.
Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, said that for companies that store closed-source projects, the ability to control where sensitive programs are stored and control the level of access granted to users is critical, especially in the European Union.
“Europe is where cutting-edge regulations and laws were born around privacy and data protection and artificial intelligence and many other things,” Domke told CNBC during a video call. “There are exciting frameworks here that are being transported back and forth around the world. data.”
“Data residency has become an important driver of any enterprise's cloud strategy, as enterprises want to know where critical assets such as data are stored,” he added.
GitHub chief legal officer Shelley McKinley said that closed source code is now regarded as the “crown jewel” of the company's digital strategy.
“European customers are placing higher demands on us in this area,” she told CNBC. “The EU has been at the center of this (data residency) movement since the beginning of the cloud era.”
Going forward, GitHub plans to roll out data residency in GitHub Enterprise Cloud in other regions, including Australia, Asia, and Latin America.
EU promotes digital “sovereignty”
GitHub’s data residency links it to broader political and regulatory themes within the EU around so-called digital “sovereignty.”
The EU is investing billions of dollars in areas it considers fundamental and core technologies Strengthen its technological sovereignty and reduce its dependence on the United States and China. The region currently relies heavily on technology from abroad. Top officials are working to change that.
Earlier this month, former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi released a long-awaited report calling for an additional €800 billion in annual investment to improve the EU's competitiveness, citing technological innovation as a key area for improvement. .
Draghi said: “Europe must refocus its collective efforts to close the innovation gap with the United States and China, especially in advanced technologies. Europe is stuck in a static industrial structure, with few new companies emerging to disrupt existing industries or develop new ones. growth engine.
GitHub's Dohmke said Europe currently lags behind the United States and China in cloud computing adoption.
Data from data center operator Stackscale shows that 45% of EU companies used cloud computing last year, an increase of about 4 percentage points from 2021 to 2023.
For example, in France, only 27% of businesses in the EU use cloud technology, while the adoption rate is much higher in the Nordic countries, with 78% of businesses in Finland using cloud technology.
However, from a global perspective, Domke said he is optimistic about the future of technological advancement. In November last year, GitHub launched a new version of the “Copilot” programming assistant, called GitHub Copilot Enterprise, which provides developers within the company with an easier way to use AI technology to generate software code.
According to Dohmke, developers using Copilot's assistant can produce code 55% faster than programmers who don't use AI software.
In the future, he envisions a world where artificial intelligence can automate a much larger amount of the work involved in writing code.
Developers will start to get “AI-native agents” to fulfil certain tasks in their coding journeys, he said, adding that it'll also become easier for people who aren't software programmers to be able to create their own software code thanks to AI.