Dirk Wiese, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, has received government representatives and representatives of European cloud initiatives from Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia, Germany and the European Commission at a cloud computing conference. The event is focused on the pan-European harmonisation of national cloud initiatives; this harmonisation is an important step towards the European Digital Single Market.

State Secretary Dirk Wiese said: “The single market is the foundation of the EU. The European Digital Single Market will ensure that this foundation remains firmly in place in the digital age. We have already achieved a lot of successes in this regard in recent years: we have harmonised national rules on cross-border online trade and on copyright law, and we have abolished roaming charges for mobile telephony. But more remains to be done. Cloud services are currently a focus of our work, because they are a key instrument for the digital transformation of our economy. We need common standards particularly in order to help small and medium-sized enterprises in different countries to assess and use cloud services. At the instigation of the Economic Affairs Ministry, three European label initiatives signed a joint agreement last December. We wish to extend this cooperation to embrace more European countries. Today’s conference is providing vital momentum for this and bringing us even closer to a genuine European Digital Single Market.”

The aim of the European cloud initiatives is to develop harmonised European standards for clouds and to mutually recognise national certificates on this basis. At the end of last year, the three cloud initiatives Zeker-Online (Netherlands), Label Cloud (France) and Trusted Cloud (Germany) pressed ahead and signed an agreement on cooperation.

The Trusted Cloud project

The Trusted Cloud project was realised under the umbrella of the Economic Affairs Ministry with a view to making cloud computing more transparent and boosting confidence in the technology. The Trusted Cloud label is issued by an association called Kompetenznetzwerk Trusted Cloud e.V. The association’s members are users, providers and academics. The Trusted Cloud label is awarded to cloud services which meet minimum standards in terms of transparency, security, quality and compliance with the law. At present, 17 cloud services have been granted the right to use the Trusted Cloud label. You can find out more about Trusted Cloud at www.trusted-cloud.de.