Experience: 

European Cloud Service Providers face, mainly, to big issues in order to develop competitive services in a global market:

1. Have a real single European Market
2. Show potential customers how reliable they are and how they help to be compliant with EU regulations

Ideas: 

First one is being adressed with many proposals in this forum, so I would go in depth with the second one.

Cloud customers need to have a way to know how secure cloud services are; this could be achieved implementing the recomendation of CyberSecurity Strategy of EU to develop security labels or kite marks for ICT services. There are some initiatives leaded by ENISA in order to clarify the market (CCSL), but it should be complemented with some legislative initiatives:

1. Establish the criteria that should be met by those security labels / kite marks.
2. Establish a framework for mutual recognition of thos security labels / kite marks issued in any country of EU.
3. Give example of using that system to show adherence to security requirements in EU public procurement of cloud services according to article 43 of Directive 24/2014/EU.

Dissemination of this kind of transparency mechanisms would help cloud customers to know what security conditions have cloud services and build trustworthy relationships between users and providers. Using this security labels / kite marks would contribute to build a strong ecosystem of users, providers and security assurances that could make european market the strongest on the field of cloud computing.

Antonio Ramos, Founding Partnert

LEET security, ICT Rating Agency