Today, 4th July, the steering board of the European Cloud Partnership will be meeting in Tallinn. The European Cloud Partnership (ECP) is one of the key actions under the EU cloud strategy (launched by the European Commission in 2012) – subtitled  ”Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe”.

The partnership brings together experts from industry and public sector and aims to improve public procurement of cloud services in Europe, by establishing common definitions of requirements, possibly going as far as joint procurement across borders. This should make the public sector more effective, i.e. save money and do more with less, while it would also stimulate a European cloud industry.

Cloud Software program is participating in ECP activities via Cloud Software program driver company F-Secure CEO membership in ECP Steering Group. In practice there currently are two ECP work streams initiated by F-Secure: Cloud Software Guide and Cloud Security Guide.

ENISA has kindly taken ownership for the Cloud Security Guide. Working together with ENISA allows us to quickly deliver something concrete to address the security challenges many European SMEs are facing. Experts from the ECP, Cloud Software program and ENISA’s cloud security and resilience working group will be invited to provide feedback and input about what are the security opportunities and what are the main security risks for SMEs.

For more information see ENISA announcement for the Cloud Security Guide survey and review launch.