Privacy and security of cloud services and data has become an even hotter topic after the NSA headlines. In Europe the data protection and privacy standards are among the world’s highest, but there is still a lot of work to be done. Cloud-based businesses are becoming the drivers of the European economy and society. Many services are increasingly based on the Cloud and several businesses and critical infrastructures are becoming more and more dependent on them.
Over 150 Finnish key players in the Cloud research and business met in Helsinki on Friday 13th of December to present the outcome of the four year strategic Digile Cloud Software Programme. The total budget of the program was over 60M€ and it was partly funded by the Finnish Innovation and Technology Fund (TEKES). Tua Huomo, EIT ICT Labs Future Cloud Action Line Leader, has been the coordinator of this programme (middle image, on left).
The key-note of the symposium was given by Christian Fredrikson, CEO of F-Secure. He stated that the future is in a secure cloud – it’s all about who you trust. One of the new products that the CEO called “the safest cloud there is” is Younited (www.younited.com). It’s a service, which organises, finds, consumes and shares content from all your devices and cloud with one interface. You can connect e.g. Facebook and Dropbox and show your content safely through Younited. When you upload an image to Facebook via Younited your connections are able to see the image, but not to download thus giving the content owner full control of their content.
The EIT ICT Labs booth at the Symposium featured Stratosphere, the only open source platform for Big Data Analytics developed primarily in Europe, and a key deliverable of the Future Cloud Action Line. Stratosphere (getstratosphere.org) allows the easy specification of data analysis tasks that are executed in massively parallel environments such as clouds and large clusters.
"During my visit in Helsinki, I was very positively impressed by the technical level and leading position of the Finnish industry and academia on Cloud and Big Data, and their strong commitment to make Europe a global leader in this space", stated Dr. Kostas Tzoumas, co-lead of Stratosphere project (on top image).
EIT ICT Labs’ Future Cloud Action Line aims to create new business opportunities within trusted cloud solutions. The goal is that European companies offer trusted cloud services and solutions that more and more customers and consumers are demanding globally.
