SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-Science and Beyond

CloudScape III - Taking <strong>European</strong> Cloud Infrastructure Forward
VENUS-C Study on economic and legal
implications of sustainable scientific clouds
The importance of interoperability
The interoperability of the Venus-C infrastructure technologies is a key element, which
may be very useful to develop new findings in a collaborative and more efficient manner.
One research question of the VENUS-C project will be whether interoperability, among
different authorisation systems, can be enabled by mapping the common language defined
by the platform to ones defined by the local infrastructures. A loss of interoperability may
cause relevant economic but also immaterial costs for the scientists, because here resides
the added value of the Cloud platform. However, interoperability generates legal and
economic issues.
Potential Economic issues of Scientific Clouds:
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Marginal costs: of operating on a Cloud provider’s infrastructure at certain volumes of
data traffic may become more expensive than providing the necessary IT infrastructure
in-house.
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Service interruption or disruption: this could cause significant damages and a loss of
scientists’ reputation. If a large amount of personal and sensitive data is lost, how can
someone quantify this serious damage that is not only legal but also ethical?
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Licensing costs: if the scientific communities want to modify legacy application to
function in the Cloud, after the stipulation of the contract, this may cause high costs.
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Supply chain failure and problem with transfer of data and software among different
cloud service providers: when a Cloud provider outsources some of its chain services to
third parties, the level security of data can be reduced.
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Availability of programming skills to modify legacy application to function in the
Cloud: may cause high costs for the scientific communities.
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Increase of CPU-based licensing costs when we moved to a cloud platform: in this case
licensing costs of transferring could be very high and could reduce the value of a Cloud
platform.
Potential legal issues and standards of scientific Clouds
In order to make data cooperation secure for researchers, we need to identify the most
relevant issues and standards that allow them to trigger their discovery processes:
» » Data protection: in the scientific Cloud environment sensitive and confidential data
can be shared ethically if researchers obtain informed consent to do so. Consent is
also needed for the participation to the research, obtaining consent for the publication