Fresh scientific direction from Professor Vladimiro Sassone, Director of the University’s Cyber Security Academy, is advancing secure cloud computing solutions for the public sector in an EU research and innovation programme.
Professor Sassone has reshaped the Horizon 2020 SecUre iNFormatIon SHaring in federated heterogeneous private clouds (SUNFISH) project since being appointed Scientific Leader in the summer.
The project is concerned with overcoming current infrastructural and legislative barriers in order to develop and integrate software enabling computing clouds for European public sector bodies.
Initially, the project will be focussing on meeting the specific challenges faced by the Maltese and Italian Ministries of Finance, as well as the UK’s Regional Cyber Crime Units.
Professor Sassone, part of the University’s department of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), has turned to the ‘blockchain’ distributed database method as an innovative infrastructure for base cloud computing. Under his leadership, the project has formulated the concept of Federation-as-a-service (FaaS).
Professor Sassone commented:
We had started the systematic study of FaaS, having identified blockchain as an exciting vehicle to implement the concept. FaaS and blockchain are two largely independent things, but their combination – a new notion for cloud computing – offers us something really valuable and is already attracting the attention of the European establishment.
The ideas were presented at the Italian Parliament in November 2016 in a round table discussion about the future of IT in public administration. I’ll also be speaking at a government conference in January 2017.
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