Following the announcement of the European Commission’s plans for the Data Protection Directive, Kroes said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the time is right to look to the cloud to help Europe get to grips with its copyright and piracy problems. She also announced a European Cloud Partnership with €10 million initial funding.Over the past year the commission has held talks with cloud providers, users and consumers to identify the main issues that need to be addressed…
Be wary of cloud lock-in, warns Ubuntu creator
Cloud infrastructure was always meant to be based on open standards, and organisations that choose to buy capacity from public clouds that only support one standard are creating problems for themselves in the future, according to Ubuntu creator Canonical.
"All the world’s biggest clouds are built on open source technology," said Canonical’s vice president Chris Kenyon in a keynote session at Cloud Expo Europe. "They’re not all built on open standards, but open source underpins all of the largest plans."
Kenyon explained this is because open clouds are scalable, cheap and secure. He compared the evolution of cloud computing the evolution of the Internet, stating that although the Web existed before open standards, it was the arrival of HTML that prompted the explosion of innovation that made the web what it is today…