What are European common data spaces, and how do they benefit businesses?

For a company, participating in one of these ecosystems means gaining access to information it would be difficult to obtain on its own and combining it with its own data to anticipate demand, optimize processes, improve forecasts, and develop new services. These data hubs enable companies to optimize strategic business decision-making.

The rollout in Spain is moving forward. As of August 2026, the Data Economy Reference Center (CRED) has recorded more than 300 initiatives and 50 data spaces included in the Trust List, the registry that identifies verified environments aligned with European standards.

This model began to take shape in 2020 with the European Data Strategy. Currently, there are projects in various stages of deployment and maturity across 14 sectors and fields, ranging from health, industry, energy, mobility, agriculture, and finance to tourism, public administration, research, media, and cultural heritage.

To advance this model, it is essential to have a network infrastructure prepared for a distributed exchange environment, capable of connecting systems and organizations with guarantees of security, availability, and control.

To accelerate the transition from pilot projects to the effective use of data spaces by businesses and government agencies, Spain has:

• The 2024–2026 Plan to Promote Sectoral Data Spaces, from the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Public Administration. It provides for an investment of up to 500 million euros to develop data spaces, use cases, and infrastructure, and to reduce barriers to business participation. 
  In June 2026, the CRED estimated that more than 400 million euros in resources had already been mobilized through nearly 300 initiatives across 17 sectors.

   

• The Data Ecosystem Trust List, managed by CRED. An official, voluntary registry that identifies data ecosystems that have met technical, organizational, security, and governance requirements.

   

• The Data Ecosystem Kit, managed by Red.es. It funds costs associated with accessing these ecosystems to facilitate the onboarding of companies and other organizations.

Data spaces enable a company to combine its own information with data from other stakeholders to gain a more comprehensive view of its business and the environment in which it operates.

Their main benefits can be summarized in four points:

• Improve decision-making by incorporating information on demand, the market, suppliers, or the business environment.
• Optimizing operations, from production and logistics to maintenance and traceability.
• Developing new products, services, and business models by combining and reusing data.
• Enhancing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions with broader and higher-quality industry information.

In practice, a manufacturer could combine its own data with information from suppliers, maintenance records, or energy consumption data to anticipate failures and better plan production. A hotel chain could incorporate data on mobility, demand, or destination activity to adjust resources or evaluate new expansion opportunities.

Participating in these ecosystems does not mean relinquishing control over the information. The company determines what data it contributes, who can access it, for what purpose, and under what conditions.

Governance establishes the rules for participation and use; interoperability allows different systems and formats to exchange and understand the information; and security ensures that only authorized individuals, applications, and organizations can access it.

The goal is to create an environment in which sharing data generates value without losing sovereignty over it.

European common data spaces are part of a broader strategy to build a European economy based on greater availability and use of data.

The European Data Strategy, presented in 2020, set out a plan to move toward a single market where information could flow across sectors and Member States while maintaining high levels of protection and control. Since then, the EU has also developed a regulatory framework to facilitate this exchange.

• The Data Governance Regulation, effective as of September 2023, aims to increase trust in the voluntary sharing of information.
• The Data Act, effective as of September 2025, establishes relevant interoperability requirements for data exchange.
• The Data Union Strategy, which, starting in November 2025, strengthens the relationship between the data economy and the development of AI.

The European goal is for greater availability of information to drive innovation, competitiveness, and economic activity, while maintaining security, control over data, and technological sovereignty.

The primary condition for a company to share information with other organizations is trust. A data space must reliably identify its participants, control access permissions, protect communications, and ensure the traceability of information.

Cybersecurity thus takes on a role that goes beyond protecting systems from attacks: it becomes an enabler of new data-driven collaboration models.

Network infrastructure is also a pillar of this model. Participating in a data space involves connecting users, corporate offices, data centers, applications, cloud services, and external platforms, while maintaining consistent policies for access, protection, and traceability.

A software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN), such as Saima Systems’ SAIWALL Secure SD-WAN, allows for the centralization and automation of these policies, the segmentation of communications, and the adaptation of connectivity to the needs of each application or service. It provides visibility, control, and resilience in an environment where data flows between multiple systems and organizations.