H-CLOUD lead coordination and support activities for the consolidation and growth of the cloud computing research and innovation community in Europe, bringing together innovators, policy makers, cloud computing research, industry and users into an open, participatory and sustainable forum.
H-CLOUD provided a rich set of collaborative content, tools and actions to overcome fragmentation and increase collaboration in Europe and beyond, while aligning on a common direction to help create a Cloud agenda for the future of Europe.
With the start of the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) of the European Union covering the 2021-2027 period, the European Commission (EC), after setting new priorities and directions to shape Europe over the MFF period and beyond.
In particular, EC identified three key three challenges in relation to EC strategies related to cloud computing:
● Cloud federation;
● Edge computing;
● Green computing.
Stemming from the above challenges and other priorities in the sector, H-CLOUD proposed different actions to coordinate the cloud community across Europe and beyond and to support the creation of impact in the digitalization of Europe.
In the first instance, H-CLOUD gathered the European Cloud stakeholders in a sustainable, informed and coordinated open community through the H-CLOUD Forum. This brought together innovators, policy makers, the demand and supply side of the Cloud market, to remove fragmentation and increase collaboration in Europe and beyond, while aligning on a common direction to help creating a Cloud agenda for the future of Europe.
Following the analysis of the EU cloud actors landscape, and a first analysis of the challenges ahead for cloud computing and, linked to that, digitalization in Europe (discussed in the Green Paper), H-CLOUD provided a strategic guidance on how to address challenges and opportunities to unlock the potential of Cloud Computing (CC) as core to the Digital Single Market objectives, building on the KPIs identified in the Digital Decade This resulted in 1) the final White Paper onboarding feedbacks from different stakeholder and consolidated through a public consultation; 2) almost 300 strategic recommendations categorised according different dimensions, such as stakeholder group and or type of action.
To accomplish its mission, H-CLOUD key objectives are:
● Objective 1 – To increase awareness of barriers, benefits, needs, research & innovation, and pre-standardization opportunities
● Objective 2 – To create and operate the H-CLOUD Forum community to facilitate coordination, collaboration, knowledge sharing and innovation
● Objective 3 – To develop the European Cloud Computing research and innovation strategy and its implementation plan
● Objective 4 – To ensure sustainability of the H-CLOUD Forum activities
