European Cloud Partnership Steering Board adopted recently the TRUSTED Cloud Europe framework to support the definition of common cloud best practices, linking them to use cases, and applying them in practice.
This paper presents two groups of actions in order to reach this objective:
- Firstly, a flexible common framework of best practices needs to be created, at the legal, technical and operational level. This common framework, consisting of legal and operational guidelines as well as technical standards, can be voluntarily adopted by cloud providers to show that their offering is in compliance with the common framework, and can be used by buyers of cloud services (in the public or private sector) in order to determine more easily whether a cloud service complies with the requirements of their use case.
- Secondly, systematic consensus building is required, through public consultations, workshops, coordination groups etc., targeting all stakeholders, including citizens, public administrations, the cloud industry and cloud users. This would result in a common understanding on issues such as risk management, security requirements, privacy needs, enforcement methods, procurement practices, and any need for legislative reform, all of which can differ from use case to use case.
The expected cumulative economic effects of cloud computing between 2010 and 2015 in the five largest European economies alone is around € 763 Bn.
The cloud economy is growing by more than 20% and could generate nearly € 1 trillion in GDP and 4 million jobs by 2020 in Europe4, with the support of the right policy framework.