A European-based consortium of researchers and academics has announced a new project called Trustworthy Clouds (TClouds), a new virtual infrastructure project intended to develop a prototype for testing an advanced cloud infrastructure that could provide increased resiliency, privacy protection and tolerance for smart grid IT systems. Participants include IBM, Sirrix AG security technologies, Portuguese energy and solution providers Energias de Portugal and EFACEC and other academic and corporate research organizations. http://www.tclouds-project.eu/
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Researchers will develop two prototype scenarios, one for smart grid technologies and another for medical applications. The smart grid effort will show how energy-conserving systems like smart metering and a Web-based real time status and energy consumption control system can be brought into a cloud infrastructure with the benefits mentioned above, and including protection from hackers and hardware failures. “Today, data can be gathered everywhere and accessed by anything, but doing so doesn’t come without some risk, including security and data loss,” said Dr. Matthias Schunter, TClouds technical leader and computer scientist at IBM Research. “With TClouds we aim to demonstrate that the rewards in terms of both cost efficiencies and smarter services, such as healthcare and energy, can be achieved by using advanced cloud technology to reduce or, in some cases, eliminate those risks.”
