Joint venture to create national cloud services operator

The Polish Development Fund (PFR) has signed a deal with the Polish bank PKO BP to establish a national cloud services operator, said the president of PFR Paweł Borys.

Borys added that this will mean services which are cheaper and more secure than those offered by large foreign companies.

PKO BP and PFR will each own 50 percent of the company's shares. The president of PFR expressed hope that the creation of a national cloud operator will stimulate the development of small and medium-sized companies, as well as the entire economy.

"Currently, cloud services are offered by foreign players whose data centres are located abroad, and that makes the costs of using their services less attractive to the SME (Small and medium-sized enterprises) sector," explained Borys. He said that the services offered by the domestic cloud will be competitively priced and will certainly be safer, if only because they will be adapted to Polish legislation.

The new company, as the key shareholders have announced, will be registered within a month. PFR and PKO BP will also be its first clients. A catalogue of services should be ready by the end of 2019 and the new company is expected to be operational by 2020. Talks are currently under way with digital service providers, as well as with companies that have the proper infrastructure. The new PKO BP data centre will also be integrated into the system.

The president of PFR emphasised that digitisation is one of the key trends in the current technological revolution, which is beginning to determine everything: from the competitiveness of the economy, through the development of small and medium-sized companies and city management, to medical services.

Market analysts estimate that by 2020, the value of cloud services in the EU will exceed EUR 40 billion. Access to cloud technologies enables entrepreneurs to launch innovative services. At the same time, thanks to the use of the National Cloud, they will benefit from the synergy which enables the optimisation of IT costs throughout the entire economic level.