European conference Hungary: What is next in clouds?

Cloud computing is one of the technologies with greatest potential not only in IT industry but also in diverse sectors and industries. However, several legal and corporate rules must be met in a high safety and security demanding environment.

On 27 September 2016, leading experts of European top universities, research institutions and IT companies demonstrated the most recent solutions for cloud-based services at the Future of Clouds Conference in Budapest.

The conference tackled the issue of cloud computing and new opportunities in different industries, for example aviation IT. Personal interactions between passengers and airlines will be less and less, while digital interactions will become dominant. Customers can already buy tickets online and check-in for their flights from home and thus they do not need to get in touch with the airline’s staff. „However, it is still critically important for these companies to impress customers, for instance, with the help of big data analytics, which enables them to improve their services”, said Dirk Muthig, Head of CTO & Innovations at Lufthansa Systems Hungária. “Cloud computing is how computing is done – not where”, pointed out Muthig.

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Support from the European Commission

The conference focused on the projects of the Horizon 2020 and FP7 Programs, which determine the R&D as well as innovation policy of the European Union between 2014 and 2020. These publicly funded collaborative research projects aim at coupling research and innovation in order to bridge the gap between theory and practice. A total of more than € 14 million is spent on devising and exploring the advantages of solutions for cloud-based applications development and operation. In April 2016, the European Commission launched the four clusters of EU-funded projects (eucloudclusters.wordpress.com) working on cloud solutions, which aim at maximizing the impact of the projects and seek for synergies and collaboration.

“The main challenges of cloud platform providers are overcoming platform deployment interface heterogeneity and providing elastic scalability of cloud platforms” – said Prof. Dr. Keith G. Jeffery, scientific coordinator of the PaaSageproject. PaaSage is an open source integrated platform that supports the design and deployment of Cloud applications, together with an accompanying methodology that supports model-based development, configuration, optimization, and the deployment of existing and new applications independently of the existing underlying Cloud infrastructures.

Different cloud projects

The Beacon project supports the automated deployment of applications and services across different clouds and data-centers. “The main objective of the project is to define and implement a federated cloud network framework that enables the provision of federated cloud infrastructures, with special emphasis on inter-cloud networking and security issues, to support the automated deployment of applications and services across different clouds and data-centers.” - said Philippe Massonet, scientific coordinator of Beacon.

The third EU project, MUSA (MUlti-cloud Secure Applications) is developing a holistic framework supporting the security-intelligent lifecycle management of multi-cloud applications, putting the focus on how security is defined at design time and continuously controlled at operation through security-aware contracts. “MUSA H2020 project aims at contributing to building up the innovation capacity and technology excellence of the European software and service industry, particularly Cloud services” – emphasized Stefan Spahr, Software Architect at Lufthansa Systems.

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