The European Commission has outlined its plans for cloud computing.
A new strategy announced by the European Commission (EC) for the European Union (EU) has outlined the body’s intentions with regard to cloud computing and how it can be used across a variety of countries on the continent.
In a new report entitled Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe, the EC explains how it intends to accelerate and increase the use of cloud computing within businesses and the public sector.
It states that if this was achieved, 2.5 million new jobs would be created and an estimated €160 billion (£131.5 billion) would be added to the EU gross domestic product by 2020, Mondaq reports.
The proposals aim to ensure all cloud computing services meet requirements for consumer privacy and personal data security under the Data Protection Directive, as well as allowing cloud users to receive interoperability, data portability and reversibility.
One of the key barriers the EC indentifies to greater cloud adoption is concerns about data protection, so it hopes to address these and issues including contract termination, data disclosure and integrity, data location and transfer, ownership of the data and direct and indirect liability.
If all this can be done, the EC hopes that cloud providers will be able to grow to much more competitive levels on a world scale while offering all the benefits the service is known for.
A progress report will be published at the end of 2013 to demonstrate how the EC is progressing with its targets and to see if any further policy is needed to ensure goals are met.
It comes after a new poll carried out Computing magazine found that two-thirds of respondents in medium or large organisations have already adopted some form of cloud computing such as offsite backup storage.
A further ten per cent revealed they have not yet adopted the technology, but are planning to in the near future.