HP has been selected by the European Commission (EC) to coordinate the Coco (confidential and compliant) Cloud project , which aims to ensure that users can share data in the cloud securely and privately.
Aligned with the EC’s latest strategy to make Europe a single market for cloud computing, Coco Cloud will provide a flexible, legally compliant framework for secure data exchange between end-users and the cloud.
“The goal of Coco Cloud is to create a foundation for the cloud security model,” said Jakub Boratynski, head of Trust and Security Unit within DG CONNECT for the European Commission. “It will help overcome regulatory and legal issues among EU countries to ensure that sensitive data is carefully controlled and always protected by context-adaptive solutions. As trust in cloud increases, so will the trust of users in cloud services, ultimately benefitting the digital economy and society in general.”
Led by HP, the Coco Cloud project consortium will deliver a secure, end-to-end solution that bridges data repository and user device - mobile or fixed - with user-defined rules for storing, sharing and accessing data. It also will enable negotiation between cloud service providers and end users to meet their needs in exploiting cloud capabilities.
With HP as coordinator and integration leader, the Coco Cloud project consortium includes academic partners such as the Italian National Research Council, the University of Oslo and Imperial College London, and industrial partners such as Atos, working together to deliver complete solutions for the end users Agenzia per l’Italia Digitale (AGID) and Grupo Hospitalario Quirón. Legal investigation and comparison of international policies will be conducted by University of Oslo and Bird&Bird.
To simplify service delivery, lower operational risk and optimise workload across cloud providers, the Coco Cloud framework will be hosted on a secure, open, flexible HP CloudOS platform based on OpenStack® technology.
“Coco Cloud will contribute to meeting the pervasive need for data usage protection in cloud services by overcoming the limitations of currently available technology offerings,” said Xavier Poisson Gouyou Beauchamps, vice president HP Cloud EMEA. “Of the 75 research proposals submitted to the EC in the trust & security domain, this was one of only 12 to be adopted.”
