Almost everyday we witness the rise of new cloud technologies, services and solutions. Despite the existing gap, with the US giants the European Cloud Community (ECC) is growing and leading the creation of Single Digital Market in Europe. Still, to strength such market, its fragmentation needs to be reduced. Beyond that, European market is largely dominated by SME that are struggling to adopt cloud services (beyond email and cloud storage) to innovate their business due to the lack of “cloud-culture” and trust toward cloud services. European Commission is leading a number of key actions (e.g. GDPR) to overcome these and other barriers, but it requires the help and the support of the ECC, in terms of a common technology vision, policies and recommendations. While strengthening the Digital Market is beyond the capabilities of European research funding programmes, a clear mandate is to lead the definition of the Strategic Innovation and Research Agenda for Cloud Computing that should provide recommendations and strategies to guide the future of European Cloud services and their market regulations. H-Cloud addresses this challenge by creating a sustainable forum of stakeholders representing the Cloud Computing research, industry and users with the aim to define a common vision for the future of Cloud Computing in Europe. Based on the outcomes of previous actions, H-Cloud will establish the ECC forum as a live community of organisations and individuals that will collaborate around different themes with the aim of addressing challenges and opportunities at research, technological, policy, standardisation and organisational level. The creation of a common vision on Cloud Computing, will be the key to unlock the potential of Cloud Computing to support the creation of a Digital Single Market. Through an open governance model and valuable incentives, H-Cloud will ensure that ECC Forum will outlast the project duration, becoming a valuable asset of the whole ECC.

UNLOCK CEI’s ambition is to UNLOCK the potential for accelerating the deployment of the Cloud-to-Edge-IoT (CEI) computing continuum in Europe by focusing on the demand-side drivers and challenges to identify technology-driven innovation and business opportunities driving demand value chains. The project represents the CEI demand constituency; provide insights and guidance to the Horizon Europe R&D projects in this domain; and contribute to a proactive dialogue with the supply stakeholders to encourage the development of an open European CEI ecosystem. It focuses on emerging value chains where investment is needed to foster the deployment of the Cloud-to-Edge-IoT continuum through the forthcoming CEI large scale pilots. This will ultimately foster European autonomy in the digital economy. The workplan is designed to provide early results to feed into the development of the HE Work Programme in 2023-24 based on the ongoing dialogue with the stakeholder ecosystem. The project pays specific attention to data governance issues, leveraging the relationship with industry-driven initiatives such as Gaia-X and CCAM (Connected, Co-operative & Automated Mobility) partnership. UNLOCK carries out a systematic assessment of the state of the open European CEI ecosystem and develop future market scenarios and related market pathways for the development of the open European CEI ecosystem. It will engage with industry stakeholders representing the most relevant industry value chains in Europe for CEI potential demand and develops a productive and effective interface between the demand constituency and the supply side, including the coordination of HE projects resulting from CL4-2021-DATA-01-05, CL4-2022-DATA-01-02, and CL4-2022-DATA-01-03 and Cluster 3 cybersecurity projects. It finally designs and implement a coordinated communication and dissemination strategy running throughout the lifetime of the project to create awareness about the whole of the European demand-side landscape.

AGINFRA+ addresses the challenge of supporting user-driven design and prototyping of innovative e-infrastructure services and applications. It particularly tries to meet the needs of the scientific and technological communities that work on the multi-disciplinary and multi-domain problems related to agriculture and food. It will use, adapt and evolve existing open e-infrastructure resources and services (AGINFRA, OpenAIRE, EGI, EUDAT, D4Science), in order to demonstrate how fast prototyping and development of innovative data- and computing-intensive applications can take place. AGINFRA+ will evolve and develop further the resources and services of the AGINFRA research data e-infrastructure, which has been developed in the context of the FP7 agINFRA project and is now being operated and evolved by key stakeholders in agriculture and food (including Agroknow, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, INRA, Wageningen UR, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and others).

The EDISON project will focus on activities to establish the new profession of ' Data Scientist', following the emergence of Data Science technologies (also referred to as Data Intensive or Big Data technologies) which changes the way research is done, how scientists think and how the research data are used and shared. This includes definition of the required skills, competences framework/profile, corresponding Body Of Knowledge and model curriculum. It wil develop a sustainability/business model to ensure a sustainable increase of Data Scientists, graduated from universities and trained by other professional education and training institutions in Europe. To achieve this, EDISON will work with the major Data Science stakeholders from academic, research communities and industry, as well as with the professional community to help them to obtain proper education and training and/or formal certification for already practicing self-made Data Scientists, grown from the advanced research projects who want to build a new career in Data Science. Consistent Data Science education and professional training requires besides theoretical knowledge access to real scientific data infrastructure and real large data sets to acquire practical experience and develop data centric thinking. For this, EDISON will leverage on EGI infrastructure and community/activities, as well as products from the APARSEN project, to create a supporting infrastructure for Data Science education and training that will include both example datasets and virtual labs which will allow the students or trainees to work with real data sets, infrastructure and tools. EDISON will facilitate the establishment of a Data Science education and training infrastructure at major European universities by promoting experience of 'champion' universities involving them into coordinated development and implementation of the model curriculum and creation of cooperative educational and training infrastructure.

The eXtreme DataCloud (XDC) project will develop scalable technologies for federating storage resources and managing data in highly distributed computing environments. The services provided will be capable of operating at the unprecedented scale required by the most demanding, data intensive, research experiments in Europe and Worldwide. XDC will be based on existing tools (TRL8+) that the project will enrich with new functionalities and plugins already available as prototypes (TRL6). The targeted platforms are the current and next generation e-Infrastructures deployed in Europe, such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) and the computing infrastructures that will be funded by the upcoming H2020 EINFRA-12 call. The main high-level topics addressed by the project include: federation of storage resources with standard protocols, smart caching solutions, policy driven data management based on Quality of Service, data lifecycle management, metadata handling and manipulation, data preprocessing and encryption during ingestion, optimized data management based on access patterns. All the developments will be driven and tested against real life use cases provided by the consortium partners representing research communities belonging to a variety of scientific domains: Life Science, Astrophysics, High Energy Physics, Photon Science and Clinical Research. The XDC software will be released as Open Source platforms available for general exploitation.