Presenters: Federico M. Facca (MARTEL) and Massimiliano Claps (IDC)

Moderator: Mark Dietrich (EGI)

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The EU eGovernment Action Plan 2016-2020 prompted public administrations and public institutions in the European Union to "be open, efficient and inclusive, providing borderless, personalized, user-friendly, end-to-end digital public services to all citizens and businesses in the EU". Data has a central role in the public sector, and the EU Data Strategy, released in February 2020, focuses on initiatives to support the wider access and usage of data in Europe to increase the digital uptake of EU society, including as well public digital services. To support this uptake, the EU Data Strategy proposes two high impact projects:

the creation of Data Spaces (including on Public Administrations); and
the creation of pan-European federated cloud services.

These initiatives aim to support highly distributed data processing, including processing at the edge, covering different security and data protection aspects to support digitalisation of the EU public sector in the next future.

H-CLOUD, as part of its work in support of the European Cloud Computing Community and of the European Commission, investigated challenges and opportunities for Public Services linked to Cloud Computing research, innovation, deployment programmes and policies. Preliminary results highlight that European governments have adopted all types of cloud computing deployment models, from public cloud, to on-premise private clouds. But cloud adoption in government remains well below that of other industries, like education institutions, retail and manufacturing companies. And differences exist across EU 27+ countries, with the UK an early adopter, whilst the two largest members of the European Union, Germany and France, well below average.

In this webinar we will gather feedback, from experts on public service innovation and IT, on key challenges we identified in our research and on potential recommendations.

To this aim, we invited a number of public services experts to discuss challenges identified by H-CLOUD Green Paper and the related draft recommendations. From this consultation a White Paper will be developed and provided to the European Commission to inform future work programmes (Digital Europe, CEF-2 and Horizon Europe).

The webinar is meant to allow experts to interact with the H-CLOUD team. The webinar will be structured as follow:

5 minutes introduction to H-CLOUD and the overall Green Paper
15 minutes introducing the finding of the Green Paper in relation to Cloud supply challenges and opportunities
40 minutes of moderated session where the experts can present brief comments and provide their view on the major questions listed below

Registered attendees will receive access to H-CLOUD’s latest draft of the Green Paper, including a detailed compendium of preliminary challenges and recommendations as well as appended briefing papers on specific topics.

Major Questions

In order to contribute to the development of the white paper, we seek the attendee’s input on the following major issues and questions:

How the EU Data Strategy can effectively support digitalisation of the public sector? What type of cloud federation should be explored to facilitate collaboration between public services? (e.g. architecture models, organisational models)
What are key scenarios where data processing in cross-organisation and cross-border public services is important and what are their requirements?
How to accelerate pan-European public service deployments? What are needed incentives to promote participation in such a federation of public cloud services?

Improving Digital Public Services with Cloud, Federation and Data Sharing