2.3 CLOUD COMPUTING 2.3.1 Introduction Preamble Cloud Computing is offering several potential benefits to public bodies, including scalability, elasticity, high performance, resilience and security together with cost efficiency. Understanding and managing risks related to the adoption and integration of cloud computing capabilities into public bodies is a key challenge. Effectively managing the security and resilience issues related to cloud computing capabilities is prompting many public bodies to innovate, and some cases to rethink, their processes for assessing risk and making informed decisions related to this new service delivering model. Currently, a range of issues faced by public authorities in terms of managing the infrastructure of informational systems entails a careful analysis of the organization strategy. Among these, some of the more important issues are:     IT infrastructures existing on the level of different governmental organizations have problems of scalability, effectiveness of costs, and are often not updated to the current standards Updating technical skills for the staff serving applications in different governmental organizations becomes a less efficient process due to heterogeneous and / or old technology, not complying with standards, insulation of IT infrastructure and people in different institutions, etc. Heterogeneous security solutions which reflect in greater security risk Granular purchase of hardware and software solutions does not provide transparency on governmental level. Cloud Computing can address all these issues by:  Enabling rapid and cost-effective procurement of information systems / services for all state agencies  Eliminating the duplication of effort  Reducing risk management costs Cloud Computing Definition Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale, over a network. At the foundation of cloud computing is the broader concept of converged infrastructure and shared services. 2.3.2 European context On European level, intense activities are carried out for the standardization of concepts related with Cloud Technologies. In the communication submitted by the European Commission "Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe", one provides the first definitions and European strategies in this field. Based on the materials published by European Commission, Cloud Computing is understood as being a capacity of storing, processing and accessing data encountered on remote calculation systems. In this model, the users may assign calculation resources almost unlimited for which they need major capital investments. The adoption in private sector of Cloud technologies within the European Union exceeds 64%, however the organizations are still circumspect in implementing them. The general inclination is to use hybrid patterns of Cloud and testing non-critical services. Page 51 of 172