Implementation of Cloud Services in a Business Environment
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7.2.1.1
European Cloud Partnership
The Cloud Computing market is shaped in a large part by the public sector. Due to
the public sector’s fragmented character, it is necessary to create homogeneity to
some extent. Pooling the commonly demanded requirements could have a positive
impact on cutting costs and enabling interoperability. For this purpose the European
Cloud Partnership (ECP) has been founded, which acts as an “umbrella for
comparable initiatives at Member State level” (European Commission, 2012, p. 13).
Industry know-how and representatives from the public sector work together on
accomplishing universally applicable requirements for cloud computing. However
the goal is not to create a physical cloud computing infrastructure, but a framework,
which complies with European needs (Junger, 2012, p. 5).
7.2.1.2
Secure and fair contract terms and conditions
Instead of using complex Service Level Agreements, which strongly vary from one
cloud service provider to the other, the EC plans to develop standard contracts
based on a uniform set of rules. These rules include standard contractual clauses
governing international data transfer, as well as the adoption of binding corporate
rules. Currently it is planned to enter into force as from the end of 2013 (European
Commission, 2012, pp. 11-12).
7.2.1.3
Standardization
The goal of an underlying standardized framework for cloud related services is to
provide security, trust, and compliance with internationally accepted standards for
both companies using cloud services and providers of such. Standardization and
certification measures are already in progress by the US National Institute for
Standards and Technology (NIST) and the European Telecommunications
Standards Institute (ETSI). The current status quo is “to deploy existing standards
to develop confidence in cloud computing via comparable service stacks as well as
interoperable and diverse offerings” (European Commission, 2012, pp. 10-11).
