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Press Release: CloudWATCH1 Results - Helping Europe gear up its strategy for secure, trusted and interoperable clouds

31. 10. 2015.

Cloud computing has now reached a point where it is truly accessible to all types of organisations and pretty much a staple in the start-up culture, radically reducing the barriers to entry in any sector. While it’s a winning move for businesses, work still needs to be done on making the cloud more agile and flexible through open standards as the real leveller and enabler in this sense.

CloudWATCH is a European Commission-awarded grant charged with accelerating the adoption of cloud services across the public and private sectors. It places a strong focus on trusted cloud services based on open standards as key to innovation and opening up market access. It has worked very closely with European cloud computing initiatives to track and profile standards implementation to improve quality and interoperability and advance uptake in Europe’s future digital single market (DSM).

The CloudWATCH Standards Workshop at the end of last month helped sum up the impact of this work. "IEEE was pleased to play an active part in CloudWATCH. In particular, the Cloud Profiles efforts align closely with the IEEE P2301 Guide for Cloud Portability and Interoperability Profiles. The profiles analysis methodology developed as part of this project is of great interest to the P2301 working group especially because actual case studies of Cloud projects in Europe were utilised for the analysis. We look forward to CloudWATCH continuing this work”, said David Bernstein, CEO & Founder, Cloud Strategy Partners; Chief Architect IEEE Intercloud Standard & Global Testbed.

  • CloudWATCH has encouraged European initiatives to map their standardisation efforts through a common platform, sharing best practices on standards implementations and specific user needs, from a technical, security and legal perspective.
  • CloudWATCH has also brought together the most relevant standards groups, including IEEE Cloud, OASIS, OGF, SNIA, W3C and OW2 to consider this analytical approach. Getting these groups to have common dialogue and co-operation around Cloud Profiles is one of the most valuable outputs from CloudWATCH.
  • CloudWATCH has created a portfolio of 38 European and international use cases, identifying and analysing common requirements from a security and interoperability perspective. The outcomes have been used to develop and test a set of common standards profiles around federated cloud services. These profiles can now be picked up by specific standards groups and used as guides for users to match the standards that best satisfy their requirements.
  • CloudWATCH has developed and integrated a set of tools to facilitate small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in moving to the cloud as an increasing number of businesses ‘go digital’. It also integrates decision-making tools on the procurement of cloud services for government agencies and research institutes, reducing the time and costs of a complex process.

“Europe has been one of the leading players in standards development for years, and this is shown through the collaborative work we have facilitated under the CloudWATCH umbrella. This is a fundamental step towards future work around standards, risk management and transparent cloud pricing we are now poised to undertake in CloudWATCH2”, said Silvana Muscella, coordinator of CloudWATCH and CEO at Trust-IT Services.

Further Info:

CloudWATCH 1 ran its first phase from September 2013 to September 2015 through funding received from the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme. Its seamless transition to another 2-year phase through funding under Horizon 2020 has already begun. Partners of CloudWATCH 1 are Trust-IT Services (UK – coordinating partner), the Cloud Security Alliance (UK), DIGITAL EUROPE (BE), EGI.eu (NL), Fraunhofer FOKUS (DE) and Oxford University (UK).

Email contact info@cloudwatch.eu

Source: CloudWatchHUB