The experts write that Cloud computing poses new challenges because of the massive scale and heterogeneity of the required infrastructure. So a lot of research issues remain to be addressed for Clouds. Europe should exploit the available expertise and results from areas such as Grid, Service Oriented Architectures and e-infrastructure to help realizing the next generation of services on Cloud systems.

They think about topics as:

1. Elastic scalability;

2. Cloud (systems) development and management;

3. Data management;

4. Programming models and resource control;

5. Trust, security and privacy.

Because of the scale and complexity, Cloud services tend to cross borders very often. Hence the need for a regulatory and legal European framework to be set up by the EC and the Member States.

Also in this area, research efforts are needed into the aspects related to commercial and business aspects, in particular involving economical and legalistic concerns. Business consultants, legal researchers, governmental bodies, etc. should be encouraged to participate in investigating the particular circumstances of Cloud provisioning, the experts write.

So issues to be recearched include:

1. Economical aspects;

2. Legalistic issues;

3. Green IT

The Expert Group makes a number of additional recommendations.

ar1. The EU needs large scale research and experimentation test beds.

They see that a major obstacle for European research communities to develop and test effective large scale Cloud systems is the lack of available large scale resource infrastructures. Large scale test beds are needed for realistic experimentation and developments.

ar2. The EC together with industrial and public stakeholders should develop joint programmes and encourage expert collaboration groups.

What the experts aim at here is the development of future Cloud infrastructures and in particular of meta-Clouds. They envisage this would include research and development, academia and industry equally. The need for interoperable meta-Clouds needs to be promoted more clearly.

ar3. The EC should encourage the development and production of

1. Cloud interoperation standards

2. An open source reference implementation

Currently, there is indeed not much development in Cloud standardisation. However, the experts think the development of standards and a reference implementation would assist European SMEs in particular in ensuring their products and services in the Cloud.

ar4. The EC should promote the European leadership position in software through commercially relevant open source approaches.

Here, the experts see a big role for open source. An open source approach for research results and Cloud infrastructure support tools, they write, would ensure uptake and simplify adaptation to different environments. Europe has a strong position in open source.

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