Bergamo, April 22 2026 – Aruba, one of Italy’s leading companies in cloud services, data centers, and digital solutions, announces its membership in the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA), the global organization that develops and promotes standards and frameworks enabling secure, interoperable, and sovereign data sharing.
Through its membership in IDSA, Aruba strengthens its contribution to the development of an interoperable and scalable data space ecosystem, working alongside the association and industry partners to promote practical and accessible adoption models. In this context, Aruba is actively participating in the Data Space Adoption Forum (DSAF), one of the association’s key working groups, with the goal of complementing standard-setting activities with the development of ready-to-use solutions that make it easier and faster for enterprises to access data ecosystems.
As highlighted during the latest Data Space Symposium, the main barrier to the widespread adoption of data spaces is not the maturity of the underlying technology, but rather the adoption model itself. Today, participation requires each organization to independently deploy and manage complex infrastructures, resulting in high costs, a shortage of specialized skills, and integration timelines that are often incompatible with the needs of SMEs. This approach slows down the scalability of data ecosystems and limits access for the very businesses that form the backbone of the European industrial fabric.
In this context, the Data Space Adoption Forum (DSAF) promotes a paradigm shift by moving infrastructure outside the boundaries of individual organizations and making it available as a managed service. In this “as-a-service” model, cloud providers become an enabling layer for scalability, offering security, interoperability, and compliance in a shared manner, while allowing companies to focus on data value and use cases.
In line with this vision, Aruba is developing managed solutions based on multi-tenant architectures, with the goal of offering “click-and-connect” data space connectors as a service. The use of technologies such as Eclipse Dataspace Components (EDC) and Virtual Connector enables simplified deployment, automated onboarding, and significantly reduced time-to-access for data spaces. This results in more predictable costs, lower operational complexity, and simplified management—key factors for enabling large-scale adoption.
Use case in the automotive sector
The opportunities enabled by data spaces span multiple industries. Concerning the data space’s adoption, one of the most advanced domains is automotive, where major initiatives such as Catena-X have been productively operating a sovereign data exchange based on IDSA data space principles since 2024. Catena-X is the first globally trusted and collaborative data ecosystem for the automotive industry. Within the Catena-X association, the member companies define standards for data interoperability across the supply chain.
The core values of Catena-X are: Trusted Digital ID, Interoperability, Self-Sovereignty and Industry Governance.In this context, Aruba is actively developing a beta release of a Catena-X-compliant connector, with the goal of contributing to the digitalization of the supply chain and enabling data exchange based on shared standards. This approach reduces operational complexity, ensures compliance and data ownership, and prepares companies for future regulatory evolution. It also opens the door to concrete use cases such as digital company certification management (CCM), the implementation of the Digital Product Passport, and, in the longer term, integration with advanced analytics models and artificial intelligence based on shared and governed data.