Neelie Kroes: Cloud computing will create up to € 1 trillion in GDP in eight years

Recently, EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes told a press conference on cloud computing that if the EU's policy guidance and unification are lost, cloud computing may not be able to break through the barriers of various countries and may also lead Europe to thousands Billion euros of economic growth opportunities missed.

Recently, Neelie Kroes, European Union's digital agenda commissioner, announced that until the year 2020, cloud computing will boost Europe's annual GDP by 160 billion euros and raise up to 1 trillion euros in eight years. In addition, cloud computing can create 3.8 million jobs in Europe.

With cloud computing technology, customer data is stored on a remote server that customers can access from anywhere through the Internet. Cloud computing technology helps to achieve large-scale cost savings in the economy. According to data provided by the European Commission, 80% of organizations adopting cloud computing in Europe have reduced their operating costs by 10% to 20%.

However, promotion of cloud computing has encountered some resistance in Europe due to concerns about privacy and data loss. Neelie Kroes believes that without EU policy guidance and unification, cloud computing can hardly break through the obstacles of various countries and may thus cause Europe to miss hundreds of billions of euros of economic growth opportunities. The European Commission hopes to dispel people's concerns by explaining the complicated legal issues in data protection through experts and developing a set of global privacy standards.

To implement this plan, the European Commission has put in place a series of measures that mainly include screening of numerous technical standards to ensure that cloud service users are assured of interoperability, data portability and reversibility, and the need for such aspects by 2013 Standards; support for certification schemes for "trustworthy cloud service providers" within the EU; development of contractual terms for "safe and fair" models for cloud computing contracts, especially service level agreements; use of public sector purchasing power (total IT 20% of expenses) to establish a partnership between European Union member states and related enterprises in Europe's cloud computing business, establishing the European cloud computing market, prompting European cloud computing providers to expand their business growth and provide cost-effective online management services.

The EU also hopes that through these incentives, some large-scale enterprises in the field of cloud computing such as SAP in Germany will be trained in Europe.

These measures are not mandatory measures in the legal sense. They are guiding suggestions. The goal is to set up cloud computing supporting standards in Europe to remove policy barriers among member states such as tax and data protection.