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Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Cloud for a smart economy and smart society at Cloudscape VI


Cloudscape VI came to a close just moments ago. The event, which was held at the Microsoft Centre in Brussels, Belgium, featured much discussion of the legal aspects of cloud computing, as well as the potential benefits of cloud computing for both business and scientific research. Bob Jones, head of CERN openlab, also gave an important update on Helix Nebula at the event and we’ll have full coverage of this, as well as the rest of the conference highlights, in next week’s issue of iSGTW.


Ken Ducatel, head of software and services, cloud computing at the European Commission, spoke at Cloudscape VI about the variety of business models still evolving around cloud computing. “There are a lot of business models and they’re very complex: there’s no one-size fits all solution,” he says.


Meanwhile, Linda Strick, coordinator of the Cloud for Europe project, spoke at the event about how the different nation states which exist in Europe can make the provision of public services via the cloud particularly difficult.  “We need to initiate dialogues between public sector and industry, and address concerns on data protection, security, legal, and contractual aspects,” says Strick.


In addition, the environmental impacts of cloud computing were discussed at the event. “ICT is enabling energy reduction through optimization, but ICT also consumes a lot of energy,” says Kyriakos Baxevanidis, deputy head of the European Commission’s Smart Cities and Sustainability unit within DG CONNECT. “If the cloud were a country, it would rank fifth in the world in terms of energy consumption.”


Other highlights of the event included a brief presentation from Simon Woodman from the University of Newcastle, UK, on e-Science Central, as well as information given on the EU Brazil Cloud Connect project, which kicked off earlier this month. You can read more about e-Science Central in our in-depth interview, here, and we’ll have more on EU Brazil Cloud Connect in next week’s issue of iSGTW.


Finally, it was announced at the event that that the popular Cloudscape conference series will soon be heading away from Brussels for the first time, with the first of Cloudscape Brazil conference set to be held later this year. Again, we’ll have more on this in next week’s issue…

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