Fog computing brings cloud computing capabilities closer to the end-device and users, while enabling location-dependent resource allocation, low latency services, and extending significantly the IoT services portfolio as well as market and business opportunities in the cloud sector. With the number of devices exponentially growing globally, new cloud and fog models are expected to emerge, paving the way for shared, collaborative, extensible mobile, volatile and dynamic compute, storage and network infrastructure. When put together, cloud and fog computing create a new stack of resources, which we refer to as Fog-to-Cloud (F2C), creating the need for a new, open and coordinated management ecosystem. The mF2C proposal sets the goal of designing an open, secure, decentralized, multi-stakeholder management framework, including novel programming models, privacy and security, data storage techniques, service creation, brokerage solutions, SLA policies, and resource orchestration methods. The proposed framework is

Modular Microserver DataCentre (M2DC) will investigate, develop and demonstrate (Technology Readiness Level 7) a modular, highly-efficient, cost-optimized server architecture composed of heterogeneous microserver computing resources, being able to be tailored to meet requirements from various application domains such as image processing, cloud computing or even HPC. To achieve this objective, M2DC will be built on three main pillars: - [Pillar 1] A flexible server architecture that can be easily customised, maintained and updated so as to enable adaptation of the data centre. Open server architecture will enable integration of computing resources with constrained thermal power dissipation such as embedded CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, manycore processors integrated using established standards such as COM Express. - [Pillar 2] Advanced management strategies [Pillar 2a] and system efficiency enhancements (SEE) [Pillar 2b] will improve the behaviour of the system during runtime. The server architecture will include built-in enhancements (e.g., for computing acceleration, energy efficiency, dependability and security, behaviour monitoring, etc.) on system level. - [Pillar 3] Well-defined interfaces to surrounding software ecosystem will allow for an easy integration into existing data centre management solutions through the use of the latest middleware software for resource management, provisioning, etc. The results of these three pillars will be combined to produce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)-optimized appliances, deployed in a real data centre environment and seamlessly interacting with existing infrastructure to run real-life applications.

In this era of virtualisation, the abstraction of underlying hardware resources and the prominence of tools for infrastructural automation have been key enablers for the deployment of distributed services at scale. The growing role of software in managing infrastructures and the DevOps movement, focused on the automation of infrastructure management, are targeting the challenges of increasing speed and quality of infrastructure management, thus lowering costs and enhancing security and trustworthiness. However, the market of infrastructure automation tools is fragmented, there is no single one to manage the whole lifecycle of infrastructure as code (IaC) and existing solutions do not address all trustworthiness and security aspects throughout the whole lifecycle. PIACERE will develop tools, techniques and methods enabling organisations to fully embrace the IaC approach through the DevSecOps philosophy. PIACERE will provide the first Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to develop and verify IaC. Exploiting Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), the IDE will enable developers to create infrastructural code at an abstract level. Using the novel DevOps Modelling Language (DOML), the DevOps team will generate IaC for different languages and verify its correctness at model and code level along with the corresponding security components. The IDE is one part of the complete workflow and will be supported with: 1) a canary environment to aid the simulation of the conditions of the production environment allowing the early identification of potential vulnerabilities and 2) an IaC execution Environment to automatically deploy, monitor and ensure that the conditions are met, incorporating self-healing and self-learning features. The integration, security first and IaC polyglotism arm the DevSecOps teams to treat and work with IaC as they do with traditional code, simplifying the design, development and operation of IaC, while increasing their productivity, quality and reliability

FORTIKA aims to (1) minimise the exposure of small and medium sized businesses to cyber security risks and threats, and (2) help them successfully respond to cyber security incidents, while relieving them from all unnecessary and costly efforts of identifying, acquiring and using the appropriate cyber security solutions. To fulfil its vision the project adopts a security by design hybrid approach that adequately integrates hardware and software with business needs and behavioural patterns at individual and organisational level to: introduce a hardware-enabled middleware security layer as add-on to existing network gateways; orientate small business users to trusted cyber security services (through FORTIKA’s marketplace) packaged to tailored solutions for each enterprise and further extended to accommodate security intelligence and to encourage security-friendly behavioural and organisational changes. Ultimately, FORTIKA proposes a resilient overall cyber security solution that can be easily tailored and adjusted to the versatile and dynamically changing needs of small businesses. To this end, the project ambitiously aims to make systematic and extensive use of the existing service and product portfolio of security solution providers across Europe. Finally the introduction of a software-defined smart ecosystem in “FORTIKA Marketplace”, will provide the feature of a light mode solution, which will offer virtualized security services (with minimum downloading requirements). From their perspective, users (i.e. SMEs) may utilize a variety of services and share profiling information with the service providers in return for tailored security services aligned with their actual needs. The FORTIKA marketplace will also function as a single point of access for the profiling information for each SME. FORTIKA Cyber-security framework will be evaluated through five major types of SMEs and will be supported from 2 local SME/ICT clusters and 1 EU alliance.