World Economic Forum Round Up: Cloud dominated discussions

BT CIO Clive Selley shares his thoughts on the WEF in Davos

As the annual World Economic Forum in Davos nears its end, BT CIO Clive Selley tells Computing how he came away from the event much the wiser about the cloud.

"I attended two cloud sessions, and people seemed hugely excited about it. That excitement came from every quarter - government officials, cloud providers, and telcos," said Selley.

"We tackled a set of issues around the cloud in little sub groups - the one I attended was looking at how to provide adequate connectivity, and make superfast broadband widely available very quickly," he added.

Selley said that these sessions in Davos were just the start, and he will continue to meet with the same groups throughout the year to further tackle the issues raised.

"We will continue to meet and address concerns around data privacy, security and customer protection. These workshops will definitely persist after this and involve all constituents - the telcos, the infrastructure companies and the government bodies."

Neelie Kroes gave a speech earlier on in the week providing an outline for an EU wide strategy to actively encourage the integration of cloud services in the market.

"She is helping us have the debate and think through the issues, and is adamant Europe should leverage the benefits of the cloud. She believes education, health and productivity can be vastly improved through the widespread adoption of cloud services," Selley explained.

"She also helped us consider what role the government should play," he added.

"I think governments and public service providers will be adopters of cloud services, and as such will be an example to others. And the interaction between the people and the government will be between those cloud services, and so in that sense they will be training us to use cloud services."

Selley also said that there was considerable emphasis on security throughout the sessions, with his impression being that "we need to get our act together as an industry to make sure the customer base isn't worried about security issues".