Can eGovernment work in the Cloud? Some examples from Digital Austria

The IT industry is pushing cloud computing with the use of new paradigms. The keyword cloud means highly complex and standardized provisioning. Cloud especially change the legal environment - direct control is replaced with contractual agreements (who is responsible for for the management of data protection and the owner of the the data). We have to develop policies/guidelines especially for small public administration units (e.g. municipalities) before we start. More and more less transparency where are my data, how they are protected - maybe no national or european control. Even in the cloud we need security standards like eIDs.