Improving public services and healthcare provisioning in Europe through open clouds

The increased demand for Cloud services in recent years has also reinforced the consolidation of the European Cloud Computing and Open-Source communities. This trend needs, however, to be further strengthened as it can bring financial benefits to the European economies and advance the related research. The aim of the EU-funded project SUCRE is to further support this consolidation and create a critical mass of stakeholders who will work together on promoting the use of Open-Source in Cloud Computing. Our work in the past two years led us to the conclusion that the existing gap in addressing interoperability problems is partially the cause for slow adoption of Open-Source Cloud solutions by businesses and public institutions. This is all despite the quality of several Open-Source-based projects, their overall encouraging developments and their great potential. The findings presented in this paper are based on the outcomes of semi-structured interviews performed with key stakeholders from two high-impact sectors in Europe, the Public Sector and the Healthcare provisioning industry. The interviews took place from March 2013 until June 2014 in several European countries. Most of them have been held through face-to-face discussions and in some cases, online tools have been used. In the following paragraphs we will present the main benefits and challenges that the Cloud adoption faces in the above-mentioned sectors, as they are perceived by European stakeholders.