Europe needs its own trusted cloud, said the...

innovation, it said. The cloud’s expected cumulative economic effect in 2010-2015 in the five largest European economies is around 763 billion euros ($1 trillion), and with the right policies in place, the cloud could generate around 1 trillion euros in GDP by 2020, it said. But Europe lags behind other regions in cloud computing take-up because of the recent revelations about intelligence services’ surveillance, a lack of regulatory consistency and technologically conservative policies, it said. The group proposed two categories of actions to spur cloud computing services in Europe: (1) A flexible common framework of best practices at the legal, technical and operational level. Cloud providers could then adopt the framework voluntarily to show their services comply with it and buyers of cloud services could more easily check whether an offering complies with their requirements of their use case. (2) Systematic consensus-building by all stakeholders via public consultations, workshops, coordination groups and so on. This would arrive at a common understanding on issues such as risk management, security requirements, privacy needs, enforcement methods, procurement practices and the need, if any, for legislative reform. The European Commission wants feedback on the policy proposal by May 2 (http://bit.ly/1diB2G1).