EuroCloud can work alongside other services and tools but Simpl‑Open is the main one designed to provide a common technical foundation for European public‑sector cloud collaboration. Other national or sectoral systems may connect to EuroCloud but Simpl‑Open is the key shared framework.

No, we are referring to a public bodies of a member state, which share infrastructure resources able to be consumed by other public bodies within the same or another member state.

As part of the feasibility study, uses cases where proposed to be scored by the participant member states using a common set of criteria. The following are the categories of the use cases: Computing Environment Provisioning, Storage Provisioning, Core Managed Service. On-Demand Data Science Workbench, GPU Workload Orchestration, Cross-Border CI/CD Automation, Automated Event-Driven Streaming, Multi-provider Event Stream Failover and Disaster Recovery and Backup

For the EuroCloud Feasibility Study, Member States were represented by public-sector organisations such as national IT agencies and digital ministries.

For the Netherlands, this included:

• A cloud architect from Overheidsdatacenter‑Noord, the Dutch government datacenter providing secure digital infrastructure for public bodies.
• A policy expert from the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK), responsible for national digital‑government strategy and coordination.
• An architecture professional from I‑Interim Rijk, the cross‑government digital expertise group supporting ministries in delivering their IT and transformation programmes.

Using EuroCloud does not automatically make an organisation part of a data space. EuroCloud simply builds on capabilities already provided by Simpl‑Open — such as the federated catalogue, identity and access management, trust services, access‑control policies, and the mechanisms that enable resource sharing between providers and consumers — regardless of whether they operate inside a data‑space environment.

For the Member State participants in this pilot, the primary interest was in gaining platform‑ and infrastructure‑as‑a‑service capabilities, rather than data‑sharing features. The beauty of Simpl‑Open is that it supports both: it can power data spaces, but it can just as easily support other types of government‑scale digital services. That flexibility is one of its key strengths.

One of the advantages of EuroCloud is that it makes it possible for European public administrations to share the infrastructure they already operate. This allows workloads to be distributed more efficiently across existing environments, reducing pressure on individual systems and avoiding the need to deploy additional infrastructure. It’s a practical way to make better use of what is already in place.

Yes, different ontologies have been analysed for describing the assets on the catalogue. The POCs are using an ontology from TMForum, but this can be changed to acomodate different needs. This is a capability already supported by Simpl-Open.

No, Simpl-Open is used to provide the enabling capabilities around IAM, cataloguing, access policy management, and the mechanisms that connect infrastructure providers and consumers (onboarding, provisioning, and governance controls). Once the infrastructure is provisioned, access to the data is established and enforced through the provider and consumer infrastructure services and controls, without the middleware being in the data path. In the POCs, data transfer and data management were handled directly within the provisioned infrastructure, after provisioning, rather than being transfered via Simpl-Open middleware.

EuroCloud is intended for public bodies of European Union Member States and therefore only contemplates participation from EU Member States. As such, participating entities fall under applicable EU regulations. The infrastructure that may be shared under EuroCloud depends on the specific providers involved, thus, sovereignty requirements must be ensured by the Member State provider responsible for the infrastructure, in accordance with applicable national and EU regulations.

Yes, EuroCloud intends to use Simpl‑Open’s capabilities wherever they add value — especially for identity management, cataloguing, secure access and trust services. This avoids recreating components that Simpl‑Open already provides, ensuring consistency across the ecosystem and helping accelerate implementation.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the technical feasibility of EuroCloud. Although the selected ontology already includes some metadata related to SLAs, those aspects fall outside the scope of this work. They are being examined separately in another Feasibility Study that focuses specifically on the legal and organisational dimensions of EuroCloud.

EuroCloud is aligned with wider European policy initiatives, including the Cloud and AI Development Act. Both share the same goal of strengthening Europe’s digital autonomy and ensuring that public‑sector cloud and AI services meet high standards of trust, security, and interoperability. It is also important to note that this type of initiative was explicitly called for by the Cloud Alliance working group, which highlighted the need for a European approach to cloud capacity that supports sovereignty while remaining practical for public administrations. In this sense, EuroCloud directly responds to that request and helps translate those policy ambitions into a concrete, usable technical framework.

The Proof of Concept is designed to verify that the EuroCloud concept is technically feasible. All code developed during the PoC, along with the documentation needed to deploy and run it, will remain in the European Commission’s repository so it can be reused later if the Commission decides to move into an implementation phase.

However, the instances deployed specifically for the PoC will be removed once the project ends. The goal is to validate the concept, leave behind reusable assets, and ensure a clean handover without maintaining temporary environments.

Several challenges were encountered during the project, particularly because we were the first to deploy Simpl‑Open in an environment that was highly heterogeneous and not originally designed for this purpose. The feasibility study surfaced important frictions — such as the need to reconcile different national approaches, ensure interoperability across diverse infrastructures, manage technical complexity, and balance sovereignty requirements with the practical realities of cloud operations.

These insights are extremely valuable and will directly inform the next steps of the initiative, helping shape a more robust and scalable path forward.