The state of governmental cloud deployments in Europe
The EU’s cybersecurity Agency ENISA has analyzed the present state of play regarding governmental cloud deployment in 23 countries across Europe.
In the report the countries are classified as “Early adopters”, “Well-Informed”, “Innovators”, or “Hesitants” based on specific criteria. Finally, the new report presents ten recommendations for successfully rolling out governmental cloud services, as Cloud is recommended as cheaper and safer for data protection of the citizens.
This report presents governmental Cloud deployment in 23 European countries (20 EU MS): Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Malta, Republic of Moldova, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and the UK.
Some key findings of the report:
- Public and private sector organisations are increasingly switching to Cloud computing.
- Public bodies are key players in boosting Cloud computing, which offers scalability, elasticity, high performance, resilience and security, together with cost efficiency.
- Governmental Clouds can also simplify citizen interaction by reducing information processing time, lowering the cost of government services and enhancing citizen data security.
Top ten recommendations for the secure deployment of governmental clouds:
- Support the development of an EU strategy for governmental Clouds
- Develop a business model to guarantee sustainability as well as economies of scale for gov-Cloud solutions
- Promote the definition of a regulatory framework to address the “locality problem”
- Promote the definition of a framework to mitigate the “loss of control” problem
- Develop a common SLA framework
- Enhance compliance to EU and country specific regulations for Cloud solutions
- Develop a certification framework
- Develop a set of security measures for all deployment models
- Support academic research for cloud computing
- Develop provisions for privacy enhancement.