The ultimate goal of A4Cloud is to produce solutions that enhance the accountability in cloud environments, extending it through the entire service value chain. A4Cloud will focus on risk analysis, policy enforcement, monitoring and compliance auditing in order to extend accountability across entire cloud service value chains, covering personal and business sensitive information in the cloud. This project will have a lasting impact on the current european ICT sector, as it tackles several of the perceived challenges to the adoption of cloud-based services. 

The consortium of A4Cloud is formed by 13 members, leaded by Hewlett-Packard. The role of NICS in A4Cloud is mainly centered in the development of metrics for accountability-related concepts. Most of these concepts are subjective properties, difficult to measure, and therefore, represent a technical challenge to solve. In addition, NICS also provides its expertise in Trust Management and Security, as well as collaborates in dissemination activities.

The main question addressed by FACIES is how to identify, in the early stage a failure and/or attack in a scenario composed by several and interdependent critical infrastructures. Specifically the project aims to illustrate the feasibility of a distributed approach able to detect in the early stage failures and malicious adverse events. Such a solution is based on a system of system modelling and use partial and incomplete information. Notice that this is a crucial point due to the sensible nature of many data and the consequent reluctance of the operators to share such a data.