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As the realization of Cloud computing environments advances from a simple and single private Cloud towards a more complex Cloud Service Ecosystem consisting of multiple coexisting public or hybrid Clouds, there are emerging high level concerns such as risk, trust, ecological, security, cost and legal factors that underpin the non-functional properties of the ecosystem. These concerns are beyond the traditional focus of providing functionalities at levels close to a single Cloud infrastructure such as hardware resource virtualization. In this paper we present ongoing research work to analyze and address the risk factor in such a Cloud Service Ecosystem for the purpose of optimizing Cloud service. The main contributions of the work are the design and implementation of an effective and efficient risk assessment framework (methodologies of risk identification, evaluation, mitigation and monitoring) for Cloud service provision. Together with the corresponding mitigation strategies, the framework provides technological assurance that will lead to a higher confidence of Cloud service consumers on one side and a cost-effective and reliable productivity of Cloud Service Provider (SP) and resources organized by individual Infrastructure Provider (IP) on the other side. The design of the risk assessment framework and its software toolkit implementation is part of the research and development work of the OPTIMIS (Optimized Infrastructure Services) project whose objective is to enable an open and dependable Cloud Service Ecosystem that delivers IT services that are adaptable, reliable, auditable and sustainable both ecologically and economically.