7 Reasons Why Europe is Crucial for Cloud Computing

Despite the fact that it did not give birth to the hugely popular sites such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, Europe still holds a lot of appeal in terms of cloud computing and web infrastructure. Here are the top 7 reasons why it is given much importance throughout the world in terms of these two technologies:

Even though cloud computing services are predominant in North America and the surrounding regions, Europe is not far behind in offering something of value other than strict privacy regulations.

Before further discussion at our Structure: Europe event Oct. 16 and 17 in Amsterdam regarding cloud computing in Europe, here I present you 7 reasons why Europe is important for cloud computing for a quick warm-up session:

Unpolluted and Innovative Energy

Owing to their good weather and a wealth of renewable energy, many areas in Northern Europe are being used as testing sites for state-of-the-art data center blueprints. These include Facebook’s hydro powered plant located in Sweden and Google’s facility in Finland that is cooled by means of seawater, among various other similar projects and facilities.

Wealth of Talent 

Europe has an abundance of skilled programmers, IT engineers and workers having skills that are much in demand nowadays, facilitating outsourcing and enabling numerous cloud startup projects. Niges is an example of a web server that was created and promoted commercially by Igor Sysoev, a resident of Moscow.

London’s Financial Hub

One reason Dublin, Ireland is surfacing as the hub of data centers is probably its close proximity to London, without its plethora of problems related to power shortage. London, however, still holds a lot of appeal to the financial industry that invests heavily in cloud computing each year.

CERN

CERN has strongly influenced the cloud industry and has also come up with a concept, known as the Large Hadron Collider, which is a huge step towards one of the most extraordinary research networks. This network is spread across several countries and supercomputers and is capable of producing a huge amount of data. Apart from that, CERN supports various open-source cloud projects, including OpenStack, OpenNebula and the Europe-based Helix Nebula research cloud.

OpenNebula

OpenNebula – an open-source cloud platform headed by Spanish computer scientist Ignacio Llorente – is a strong competitor against OpenStack and CloudStack. This particular project was initiated in 2005 and boasts an impressive user base of big companies and European research institutions.

Ability to Capture and Resell Tweets

Based in Reading, England, DataSift is a certified reseller along with two other companies (Gnip and Topsy) of the numerous data points streamed from Twitter on a daily basis. Corporate analytics mostly focus on social media – Twitter in particular – and those capable of gathering and evaluating all the tweets of the world are held in high regard.

Privacy Rights and Regulations

Data governance laws of European Union and its countries may not always appeal to American cloud companies; however, it should be the opposite, and their laws should not be disrespected. An example is the Facebook’s facial-recognition feature that has been banned in Germany to protect users’ privacy and minimize security risks, as an increasing amount of personal information is exposed by individuals on the web.