SUNFISH (SecUre iNFormatIon SHaring in federated heterogeneous private clouds) is a Research and Innovation project funded under the first Horizon 2020 call dedicated to Advanced Cloud Infrastructure and Services (Jan.’15 - Dec.’17).
SUNFISH has developed advanced Cloud Infrastructure and Services in order to overpass the lack of infrastructure and reliable technologies that can enable Public Sector bodies to federate their private cloud infrastructure. The software platform enables secure federation of Cloud infrastructure, with a focus on the public sector’s requirements.
In this context, SUNFISH had to deal with various key challenges:
1.eGovernment solutions are rapidly moving towards the adoption of private clouds. This process are facing the problem of integrating services provided by their own private cloud with data and services provided also by external private clouds (adoption of “hybrid” cloud models).
2.Storage of information in the cloud is considered an acceptable risk only if the long-term security and confidentiality of data can be guaranteed effectively.
3.Choosing to store data on external systems could potentially expose to the risk of data being stolen or used for fraudulent purposes.
The consortium consists of 11 heterogeneous organizations (Public Bodies, Universities, IT Developers, SMEs, R&D Institutes), coming from 6 different countries (Italy, UK, Israel, Estonia, Malta, and Austria), formally coordinated by the Italian Ministry of Finance (MEF).
Since SUNFISH is conceived following a user-centric approach, its practicability has been tested on the three public administrations partner of the Project and shaped around their real needs. These use cases are effective demonstrators of how the platform works and how the public sector can take advantage of the technology. The impact assessment carried out on the three demonstrators has shown the following:
•increased data sharing and service efficiency thanks to greater cloud security;
•greater savings for Public Entities achieved through optimized use of resources;
•development of new skills in the Public Sector.
Over 40 scientific publications linked to the project have been produced and publicly available Zenodo community. The project website (www.sunfishproject.eu) provides a wide range of material, including brief presentation videos, White Papers, technical demos as well as a direct link to an ad-hoc online “SUNFISH Platform Accessibility Interface”, where project key outcomes – including software components, APIs and related guidelines and documentation – have been collected and openly accessible and reusable.
SUNFISH offers a solution to federate private and public clouds, enabling them to exchange data and services in a secure and controlled manner, based on a “democratic” governance model. SUNFISH conceives, designs and implements the idea of Federation-as-a-Service (FaaS); a secure-by-design cloud interoperability solution based on blockchain technology (SUNFISH Platform). The SUNFISH architecture is developed to be scalable and easily adoptable in any cloud environment and cloud system an adequate layer of API abstractions.
Thanks to the solution that has been brought up by the combined effort of the consortium, three major objectives have been achieved:
1. The possibility to integrate different public sector “clouds”, ensuring information security;
2. A greater efficiency in the use of IT infrastructure;
3. A new impetus to the development of services for EU citizens who may benefit from sensitive data shared securely between different private clouds.
SUNFISH’s competitive advantage, based on two important features of the solution, which make it unique compared to any other available product:
-Openness, that allows the SUNFISH Platform to be interoperable with most-established cloud platform solutions (AWS, Azure, Openstack) according to the type of cloud members part of the federation.
-Adaptability, allowing users to change the range of security services according to the federation’s needs, ranging from secure data storage and anonymization, to computation and monitoring.
Furthermore, this solution is conceived to be used by a broader horizon of stakeholders with different demands.
