The Parliament Magazine - Building cloud supply on EU terms
A key enabler of data-driven innovation and technologies, cloud computing plays a crucial role in our data-powered economy; let’s ensure it has the necessary physical infrastructure to grow, writes Pilar del Castillo.
The European institutions have been developing policy on cloud computing since the adoption of the first European Cloud Computing Strategy in 2012. At that moment, the main objective was to harness the productivity that could be achieved by easy access to the best-performing business applications and/or drastically boosting their infrastructure resources at an affordable cost.
Being fully embedded in the data economy, the stakes are now much higher. Cloud computing has become a key enabler of data-driven innovation and technologies, such as 5G, AI and Internet of Things. In addition, cloud technologies offer a model of ondemand data storage and processing, both in centralised data centres, or in distributed connected devices close to the user (at the edge of the network).
“We must be bold in our efforts to ensure that European businesses and the public sector can run and store their data safely within the demands of European rules and standards”
The European Commission estimates that by 2025, 80 percent of all data will be processed in smart devices. From the policymaker’s perspective, we must be bold in our efforts to ensure that European businesses and the public sector can run and store their data safely within the demands of European rules and standards. Raising awareness of the crucial role that cloud computing development plays in a data-powered economy did not happened overnight, and the first step was taken in 2015 with the initiation of a process to create the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
The EOSC aims to develop a trusted, virtual, federated environment that cuts across borders and scientific disciplines to store, share, process and re-use research digital objects (such as publications, data, and software) in accordance with ‘fair’ principles.
