This report is addressed to Thierry Breton, European Commissioner for the Internal Market. It was elaborated following the CEO Roundtable “Shaping the Next Generation Cloud Supply for Europe” that took place on 16 December 2020.

The global cloud market is at a turning point: while traditional cloud services trend towards commoditization, innovation is progressively enabling a shift towards a fully-fledged central-cloud to edge-cloud continuum5. At the same time, demand is rising across the EU market for solutions offering greater openness, trust and control over data, and the cloud industry is increasingly coming under pressure to contribute to the environmental sustainability of the entire economy.

This document aims to provide the view of European industry on technology domains requiring strategic investment to enable the development and adoption of competitive, trusted, and sustainable cloud and edge services across the EU, building on existing strengths and future business opportunities. While cloud and edge services will intrinsically enable and benefit from other technologies (e.g. 5G, artificial intelligence, quantum computing…) to flourish, these domains are not specifically covered by the report’s recommendations. Wherever possible, synergies with existing public and private sector initiatives should be leveraged – to take an example, the GAIA-X project has already taken steps to align on common frameworks for federated cloud services.

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