Funding Proves EU Committed to Cloud Computing Key to EU-Led Innovation

EU Tech Competitiveness DA Neg

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Funding proves EU committed to cloud computing—key to EU-led innovation

Computer Weekly 14 Archana Venkatraman, Datacentre Editor - Computer Weekly, “EU funds project to boost European cloud computing market,” 21 Jul 2014 http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240225047/New-EU-funded-project-to-boost-European-cloud-computing-market

A European Union-funded project called Cloudcatalyst has been set up to assess the current cloud computing market in Europe, identify barriers to cloud adoption and provide tools to boost its growth in the region. The project aims to instill confidence in European businesses, public entities, ICT providers and other cloud stakeholders eager to develop and use cloud services. It will create “a strong and enthusiastic community of cloud adopters and supporters in Europe”, according to Cordis, the European Commission's project funding arm. According to the EC, cloud computing is a “revolution” but its providers are still struggling to captivate and build trust among businesses and everyday citizens. “Cloud-sceptics” are concerned over data security and legal exposure and a lack of information around cloud is hindering its adoption. The Cloudcatalyst project will tackle this issue by providing useful tools to foster the adoption of cloud computing in Europe and to boost the European cloud market, according to Cordis, the European Commission’s primary public repository that gives information about EU-funded projects. The project, which is funded by FP7 – the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development – will target all cloud players. These include software developers, members of the scientific community developing and deploying cloud computing services, incubators at the local, national and European levels, large industries, SMEs, startups and entrepreneurs. With a total budget of over €50bn, the project will primarily analyse practices across Europe and identify the conditions for a successful adoption. “We will cover all the main issues around cloud and give a clear overview on a number of topics, such as current cloud trends, critical success factors to overcome major technical barriers, data privacy and compliance requirements, and recommendations for quality of service and cloud SLA," said Dalibor Baskovc, vice-president at EuroCloud Europe, one of the project partners. We see cloud as an engine of change and a central ingredient for innovation in Europe Francisco Medeiros, European Commission The project will also create a series of tools to help stakeholders create value-added cloud products and services. These consist of the Cloud Accelerator Toolbox and the Go-to-the-Cloud service platform – a collection of management tools bundling together trend analysis, use cases and practical recommendations in the form of printable report templates and instructional videos. “The tools we are developing will help companies adopt and deploy cloud solutions, whatever their different needs and requirements are,” said Baskovc. The project will also carry out a number of market surveys to gather key information and produce an overview of the cloud adoption status, such as why companies should develop cloud services, the main internal problems in adopting a cloud product, the associated risks and how these issues can be addressed. According to the European Commission, cloud computing has the potential to employ millions in Europe by 2020. “We see cloud as an engine of change and a central ingredient for innovation in Europe,” Francisco Medeiros, deputy head of unit, software and services, cloud computing at the European Commission told the Datacentres Europe 2014 audience in May this year. “Cloud is one of the fastest-growing markets in Europe.”

PRISM is essential to development of EU leadership in cloud computing

Reuters 13 “Analysis: European cloud computing firms see silver lining in PRISM scandal,” PARIS/LONDON | BY LEILA ABBOUD AND PAUL SANDLE, Jun 17, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/17/us-cloud-europe-spying-analysis-idUSBRE95G0FK20130617

France has its "Sovereign Cloud" project while across the Rhine data firms have created the label "Cloud Services: Made in Germany", all trying to reassure big companies that their information is stored away from the prying eyes of U.S. spies. European firms believe revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has secretly gathered user data from nine big U.S. Internet companies, including Microsoft and Google, will hand them a competitive advantage as they play catch-up with the dominant American players in "cloud computing". Yet companies and individuals may have to accept that while storing and processing their most sensitive information on servers owned by Europeans and located in Europe could keep it from the NSA's eyes, intelligence agencies closer to home may be looking anyway. "If you are going to have a Big Brother, I'd much rather have a domestic Big Brother than a foreign Big Brother," said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at internet security company F-Secure, which also offers cloud services with data stored in the Nordic countries. Cloud computing - an umbrella term for everything from web-based email to business software that is run remotely via the Internet instead of on-site - is being adopted by big companies and governments globally to cut costs and add flexibility to their IT departments. In a Normandy town nestled in a loop of the Seine river lies a huge new data centre, a part of France's Sovereign Cloud project that some in the industry once poked fun at as being out of step with the realities of the borderless Internet. Last year the French government ploughed 150 million euros ($200 million) into two start-ups, including the data centre's owner Cloudwatt, to equip the country with infrastructure independent of U.S. cloud computing giants. Following the revelations that the NSA's PRISM program collected user data from the nine companies that also include Yahoo and Facebook, the French position now seems prescient to some people. "People are being spied on without their knowledge, and non-U.S. residents have no legal rights," said Philippe Tavernier of Numergy, another cloud-computing group that got state help. "We feel vindicated that our strategy is right." As European Union officials seek answers from the U.S. government on PRISM, technology executives, data protection regulators and analysts told Reuters the scandal may prove a turning point for the region's young cloud computing industry. European companies such as telecoms groups Orange and Deutsche Telekom are trying to exploit the concerns as they build their own cloud businesses. Government agencies and municipalities, especially in more privacy-conscious countries such as Germany, are more likely to turn to local alternatives for cloud services. Sweden recently banned Google Apps - cloud-based email, calendar and storage - in the public sector over concerns that Google had too much leeway over how the data was used and stored. "SOMEONE IS ALWAYS WATCHING" Similar changes could also gather pace in Asia where companies and regulators were already concerned about data security in the cloud before PRISM. A source at a major Chinese company that provides cloud infrastructure said governments were likely to impose stricter controls on where data was stored, although this would not be a panacea. "Frankly, wherever you put your data, someone is always watching. It could be the U.S., it could be China," he said. Some lawmakers in the European Parliament also want rules requiring companies undertaking cloud projects to protect European users' data better, and are using concerns around PRISM to lobby for their cause. They want supervisors or judges to oversee the transfer of personal data to overseas security services, and for customers of cloud companies to be able to opt out of their data being stored in the United States. Caspar Bowden, an independent privacy advocate and Microsoft's chief privacy adviser from 2002-2011, said that before the PRISM revelations the big U.S. cloud companies had been largely able to quell fears about data security with savvy public relations. "The headlines this past week will change all that. The nationality of the company and the location of the data do make a difference," he said. Even before PRISM, some companies abroad planning cloud computing projects were concerned about the powers given to U.S. intelligence agencies by anti-terrorism laws enacted after the September 11 attacks on the country: the 2001 Patriot Act and the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FISAA). A European Parliament body said in a report last year that FISAA granted the U.S. "heavy-caliber mass surveillance fire-power aimed at the cloud" and had "very strong implications on EU data sovereignty and the protection of its citizens' rights".

That revitalizes Europe’s economy—endogenous cloud computing is comparatively better

Etro 11 Federico Etro is a Full Professor of Economics at the University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari, where he teaches Macroeconomics. He previously taught at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Milan, Bicocca, “Understanding Cloud Computing Competition, Environment and Finance,” November 24, 2011, http://www.europeanbusinessreview.com/?p=3140

Cloud computing is going to reshape business in Europe and worldwide. It has been defined by the US National Institute for Standards and Technology as “a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” It is a general purpose technology able to improve productivity in all sectors and, at the same time, to have a positive environmental impact. Through cloud computing, firms will be able to rent computing power and storage from a service provider, and to pay on demand, as they already do for other inputs such as energy and electricity (the price of using a computer for a thousand hours is the same as that of using a thousand computers for one hour). This article examines some issues related to the diffusion of cloud computing: its general role in section 1, competition policy issues in section 2, environmental issues in section 3 and macroeconomic issues in section 4. Introduction A new general purpose technology such as cloud computing can provide huge cost savings and more efficiency in large areas of the private sector (especially in fields such as services and selected manufacturing sectors where ICT costs are relevant), and also of the public sector, including hospitals and healthcare, education and the activity of government agencies with periodic spikes in usage. Case studies in the private and public sectors suggest that cost advantages can be substantial. A few examples from a specific sector, the health sector, can exemplify the point (let us start from the most simple applications to move toward more relevant ones). One of the leading Italian hospitals, the Children’s Hospital of Bambin Gesù in Rome, has recently switched to an online solution for the email services of its 2500 employees (the switch took place in 2010 in less than four months, created large cost savings and allowed IT specialists to focus on other more relevant tasks for the hospital). Similar experiences are planned by the USL of Asolo in Veneto, which is also trying to use cloud computing to help operative tasks. The Swedish Red Cross has improved the coordination of its intervention by adopting a cloud computing solution, which has reduced costs of about 20 % and enhanced communication in real time between its employers. A Russian cardiovascular centre, Penza, has adopted a cloud computing solution to coordinate activities, diagnosis and decisions on treatment and surgery between doctors around the country, with crucial gains for the patients. During the H1N1 pandemic, a global cloud computing tool was build and made available in a few days (based on the Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform) to centralize and provide information on the diffusion of the flu. Cloud computing is currently developing along side few different concepts, focused on the provision of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS: renting virtual machines), Platform as a Service (PaaS, on which software applications can run) or Software as a Service (SaaS: renting the full service, as for email). In preparation for its development, many hardware and software companies are investing to create new platforms that are able to attract customers “on the clouds”. Cloud platforms provide services to create applications in competition with or in alternative to on-premise platforms, the traditional platforms based on an operating system as a foundation, on a group of infrastructure services and on a set of packaged and custom applications. The crucial difference between the two platforms is that, while on-premises platforms are designed to support consumer-scale or enterprise-scale applications, cloud platforms can potentially support multiple users at a wider scale, namely at the Internet scale. The introduction of cloud computing is going to be gradual. Currently, we are still in the middle of a phase of preparation with a few services that can be regarded as belonging to cloud computing, often derived from internal solutions (turning private clouds into public ones). Amazon Cloud Computing was launched in October 2006, IBM’s Blue Cloud in November 2007, followed by cloud solutions by Google and Microsoft. Meanwhile, many large high-tech companies as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Saleforce.com, Oracle and other CCP (Cloud Computing Providers) keep building huge data centres loaded with hundreds and thousands of servers to be made available for customer needs in the near future. Competition issues emerging from cloud computing Competition between CCPs is probably going to reshape the ICT market structure as PC distribution did in the 80s, with consequences also at the downstream level, that of the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This may raise some concern for competition and for the consequences on the users of cloud services. Let us look at the upstream level. Notice that here, antitrust evaluation may concern a market definition ranging from the three separate aspects of cloud computing (IaaS, PaaS or SaaS) at national levels up to the general market for IT services at the global level, but we believe that the most relevant market definition would probably include the three forms of clouds at a sovra-national level. Notice however, that in case of antitrust issues involving downstream companies, namely ISPs, market definition could be restricted to the national level, which is still the relevant one in each EU country for competition between telecommunication providers – see Sluijs, Larouche and Sauter (2011) for a detailed discussion. On one side, the strength of competition for the provision of cloud services suggests that multiple players (as those mentioned above and, possibly, others) would probably share the market for a while, avoiding excessive concentration.