The need for a Cloud Computing Strategy for Europe

Parliament Magazine

2011-07-10

Indeed, in the last few years, cloud computing has grown from being a promising business concept to one of the fastest growing segments of the IT industry. All over the World companies are increasingly realising the gain of productivity they can achieve by easily accessing the best performing business applications and/or drastically boosting their infrastructure resources at very affordable costs. Estimates from the European Commission calculate that by 2014 cloud revenue can reach 148.8 billion and that 60% of all server workloads will be virtualized.

The economic and commercial prospects of the "cloud" are indeed promising and there is consequently a business case for its development, which in practical terms means that with our without Europe's intervention cloud computing will continue to develop in one way or another. However for us policy makers to sit down and not reap the benefits for Europe of this next step of the Digital revolution is simply not acceptable.

Over one year ago the "EU 2020" Strategy flagship on a new Digital Agenda for Europe announced the need for developing a European Cloud Computing Strategy. Today this process is well underway and the results of the public consultation are expected to come forward after the summer. However this is not the first step towards the development of Cloud computing that the Europe has taken, already in 2010, in the area of public services, the European Commission published the Communication “Towards interoperability for European public services” where cloud computing is seen to play a major role, and the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) published a report on the main security issues related to the Cloud. If, in addition, we take into account the debates that have taken place in other fora such as the Internet Governance Forum and the intensive work on cloud issues the World Economic Forum has done, we can already draw up some of the objectives and policy actions that Europe's future Cloud Computing Strategy should attain.

Firstly we must not forget that when developing any strategic framework of action, and in particular the future cloud computing strategy, we have to try and be as horizontal as possible without taking for granted any circumstances that might not seem to directly affect its development. In this sense it must not be forgotten that strong fixed and mobile communication networks are prerequisite in order to grasp the full potential of the cloud and consequently the implementation of the revised framework for electronic communications is crucial. In addition solving other remaining challenges such as data roaming will certainly help the Cloud's development.

Secondly, due to the strong commercial nature of cloud systems the future strategy must address a wide range of aspects that range from technological issues related to cloud systems development, management and elastic scalability, without forgetting the flexibility that any ICT development needs in order not to hamper innovation when addressing standardisation matters, to non technical issues such as legalistic aspects related to data privacy and security that pose a major obstacle towards wide uptake of cloud infrastructures.

In conclusion Europe should stimulate research and technological development in the area of Cloud computing, where the development and production of cloud interoperability standards will play a major role, while at the same time together with Member States set up the right regulatory framework to facilitate its uptake.

We are in a strong position to address both these areas: technologically due to Europe's excellent background in key research and development aspects, such as GRIDs and Service Oriented Architectures, and non-technologically due to our position as a leader in data protection since 1995 which we can turn into a competitive advantage in future global markets for cloud services.

To participate in a global market means that we will have to face very well prepared competitors in the international arena, we have a good starting position with regards cloud computing and we must take advantage of it.