Project Acronym: H-CLOUD
Project Full Name: Horizon Cloud – The Forum for Strategy Focused Cloud Stakeholders
Duration: 24 months
Sector: Cloud Computing / Information and Communication Technologies
Programme: Horizon2020
Website:
https://www.h-cloud.eu
About: Almost everyday we witness the rise of new cloud technologies, services and solutions. Despite the existing gap, with the US giants the European Cloud Community (ECC) is growing and leading the creation of Single Digital Market in Europe. Still, to strength such market, its fragmentation needs to be reduced. Beyond that, European market is largely dominated by SME that are struggling to adopt cloud services (beyond email and cloud storage) to innovate their business due to the lack of “cloud-culture” and trust toward cloud services. European Commission is leading a number of key actions (e.g. GDPR) to overcome these and other barriers, but it requires the help and the support of the ECC, in terms of a common technology vision, policies and recommendations.
While strengthening the Digital Market is beyond the capabilities of European research funding programmes, a clear mandate is to lead the definition of the Strategic Innovation and Research Agenda for Cloud Computing that should provide recommendations and strategies to guide the future of European Cloud services and their market regulations. H-Cloud addresses this challenge by creating a sustainable forum of stakeholders representing the Cloud Computing research, industry and users with the aim to define a common vision for the future of Cloud Computing in Europe.
Based on the outcomes of previous actions, H-Cloud will establish the ECC forum as a live community of organisations and individuals that will collaborate around different themes with the aim of addressing challenges and opportunities at research, technological, policy, standardisation and organisational level. The creation of a common vision on Cloud Computing, will be the key to unlock the potential of Cloud Computing to support the creation of a Digital Single Market. Through an open governance model and valuable incentives, H-Cloud will ensure that ECC Forum will outlast the project duration, becoming a valuable asset of the whole ECC.
