FACIS Listens to the Industry
On 10 June 2025, the FACIS community met in Frankfurt to actively shape joint standards and elaborate new services for multi-provider ecosystems in Europe. Two workshop sessions focused on facilitating digital contracting between cloud service consumers and multiple providers, especially in view of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) – contracts for cloud service usage and their quality.
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On 10 June 2025, FACIS invited representatives of leading (industrial) companies to join two workshops in Frankfurt. The sessions focused on how to facilitate digital contracting between cloud service consumers and multiple service providers – with particular emphasis on Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which define the terms and quality of cloud services.
Digital Contracting and SLA Management: Two Expert Workshops in One Day
From digital identities in digital contracting to shared vocabulary in Service Level Management: Both workshops covered two very important topics in the 8ra community, fostering open collaboration to create a sovereign, interoperable digital multi-cloud infrastructure in Europe. One workshop focused on the next generation of Digital Contracting Services, currently being developed within the FACIS project. The other concentrated on requirements for SLA Management in multi-provider ecosystems, a special but crucial use case of digital contracting
How the Workshops Contribute to FACIS’ Bigger Vision
The overall goal of both workshops was to gather requirements from the community and to listen to the industry’s needs regarding current challenges in managing legally compliant and technically secure contracts. These hurdles arise from a lack of standards, diverse systems in use and various regulations in different countries.
“FACIS brings together key stakeholders to drive interoperability, trust, and data sovereignty. Both workshops perfectly supported that vision and sharpened our understanding of industry needs", FACIS Project Lead Emma Wehrwein states.
Thereby, the 8ra project FACIS addresses a key aspect of its bigger vision: a flexible and reliable multi-cloud ecosystem in which different providers work seamlessly together, enabling consumers to more easily develop new business models by using a variety of different cloud services and providers.
Workshop 1: Creating Joint Standards and Language in SLA Management
Building on the SLA workshop for providers in March, the second SLA workshop took the consumer perspective, exploring what is important for consumers of cloud services operating in multi-provider ecosystems. Many important questions were discussed. For example:
- What mechanisms and structures are required when many cloud providers are responsible for reliable and secure service usage?
- Why is it so important to integrate a trust anchor as a neutral review body to verify agreement processes?
- How can FACIS create a common understanding of Service Level Characteristics?
"Contracts are created by legal experts that usually don’t have the technical background in service level characteristics. That makes it harder to ensure consistency in terms of the technical language that is used in SLAs,"
says Stéphane Poulain, Aerospace Engineer at Airbus Operation GmbH.
On these grounds, FACIS develops a shared glossary of service level characteristics, its description and metrics – a so-called SLA Taxonomy.
“The goal is not to set binding SLA metrics, but to make provider’s cloud services comparable for consumers like companies from the aviation or automotive industry”, FACIS Work Package Lead Thomas Niessen explains. “The SLA Taxonomy increases transparency and strengthens the freedom of choice in terms of enabling companies to choose their cloud providers more independently.”
Workshop 2: Requirements for Digital Contracting – in Alignment with European Standards
Only a few doors down from the SLA workshop, the first FACIS workshop on Next Generation Digital Contracting Service took place in parallel. The key challenge discussed: Existing digital contracting solutions don’t fit the needs of today’s dynamic and international economy. Current processes are slow and come with high transaction fees, as well as legal and operational risks. FACIS is addressing this by developing a new generation of Digital Contracting Services: faster, secure, and borderless.
During the workshop, the participants learned more about FACIS’ vision of digital contracting and were invited to contribute their requirements and core features for such a service.
Once again, several critical questions shaped the discussion, including:
- What is the key value proposition of a Digital Contracting Service developed by FACIS?
- How to integrate contract negotiation protocols, identity verification methods in alignment with European standards and open-source licenses?
- What are the key legal compliance requirements that need to be addressed in the Digital Contracting Service specifications (eIDAS and other regulations)?
“Today’s workshop and discussion made clear that there is an urgent need for FACIS Digital Contracting Service”, Lauresha Toska, Technical Project Lead of FACIS, states. “It will link federated data ecosystems with a standardized EU identity – a key step for Europe’s digital autonomy.”
What Comes Next: FACIS’ Path to Seamless Service Usage
FACIS Project Lead Emma Wehrwein concludes the workshop day by stating:
“It was very important to hear the expectations and requirements of the 8ra community. We will now move on and gather additional feedback from industry experts and the open-source community. In August, we will kick off the tendering process for the development of the Digital Contracting Service.”
The results of both workshop sessions will be made available online and discussed in Digital Roundtables, next on 14 July. Get more information here!