Keynote: Jesús Villasante

There is growing momentum around Cloud Computing among technology providers, end users, and academia. It is considered as a key theme for both the research constituency itself and for policy makers. Even though Cloud computing is a commercial reality and the adoption rate of cloud computing services is growing, there are major issues that need to be smoothed out before big businesses will truly consider moving mission-critical applications out of their firewalls. More research is needed to tackle challenges such as scalability, security, interoperability of clouds, etc. Aspects of these challenges have been addressed to a certain degree by the Grid and SOA research communities in the past years in the European Community's Framework Programmes for RTD. The expertise gained and the lessons learned should be a basis for further research and policy making in the next generation cloud computing infrastructures. Last year, the European Commission DG Information Society created a Group of Experts in Cloud Computing with the capitalising on past expertise and research activities in the area of Grids, SoA and Virtualisation technologies. This group of experts has worked on a report that outlines the future directions of Cloud Computing research.