“Cloud computing” The Eu Commission at a turning point

The European Commission is going to give a boost to his “cloud computing” strategy. The draft will be released next week by Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes. According to rumors there will be investments (in public and private sector) for €45 billion by 2020 to generate an estimated €900 billion in GDP and an additional 3.8 million jobs. Or, at least, this is the Eu’s hope.

Cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over Internet. End users access cloud-based applications through a web browser and their data are stored on servers at a remote location. For example on Gmail, the Google’s e-mail, users can store more than 1Gb of mails and they can freely use other services like shared documents, YouTube, calendar etc. Thanks to cloud computing people can also use software without installing them on their computer but directly on the server. Proponents claim that cloud computing allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with improved manageability and less maintenance and costs. The savings from increased use of cloud computing should arise because of reduced spending on ICT (Information and communications technology) capital equipment, reduced spending on ICT operations and reduced spending on power and cooling

A research of the danish institute Copenhagen Economics says that “public sector cost savings in ten European countries from using unified communication technology and cloud computing could be of 6 billion Euro per year”. Only in Italy it could be of 0,5 billion per year. The research says that “it saves on investment costs. Instead of investing large blocks of money in new equipment and software at different time intervals, cloud computing smoothens the cash flow because users buy a service flow, which is more evenly distributed over time. This may in particular be an advantage to heavily indebted countries such as Belgium and Italy”.

That will create a great business all over Europe. The research firm Gartner predicts that cloud computing market will grow almost 20% this year to become a $109 billion industry.

The critics of this technology say that it is a big risk to privacy because a lot of private data will be stored by a private company, others say that we could have the same service using open source software that are free or very cheap (but without storing data remotely). As part of the internet, cloud computing is borderless and that raise issues with who is responsible for that information, where does the jurisdiction lies. An Italian provider could have, for instance, a server in Russia.

The European commission will have to face all this issuesThe idea of Neelie Kroes is to crate a “European Super-Cloud” for public sectors across the EU to allow public authorities to work together. The EU also already launched its first cloud software Optimis with partners like City University of London, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University of Hannover and British Telecom. The project is backed by €10.5m from the EU budget. The hope is that it could generate an additional €250bn by 2020 and an extra 2.5 million jobs.

 Alfonso Bianchi  ©Eunews

To lern more:

A Digital Agenda for Eu http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/index_en.htm

Optimis progect http://www.optimis-project.eu/

The Copenhagen Economics’ research on cloud computing in public sector http://www.copenhageneconomics.com/Website/News/News-archive.aspx?M=News&PID=2169&NewsID=502

Richard Stallman: “Who does that server really serve?

” http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html