A group of leading standards development organizations are working jointly to foster common standards for cloud computing and storage, beginning with the launch this week of a new wiki resource site called cloud-standards.org.
"We brought together a large number of players so we don't get an enormous mess of standards," said Richard Soley, chairman and chief executive officer of Object Management Group, one of the organizations participating in the effort. Soley announced the formation of the group at a cloud computing symposium held by National Defense University's Information Resource Management College on July 15.
The organizations joining in the collaborative effort include the Cloud Security Alliance, the Distributed Management Task Force, the Open Grid Forum, the Storage Networking Industry Association, and the Open Cloud Consortium, with other groups expected to participate, Soley said.
The Cloud Standards Coordination working group plans to focus its efforts on identifying current and emerging practices and products supporting cloud computing, and helping to rationalize cloud computing and storage standards, according to Soley. It expects to concentrate on several dimensions of cloud computing, including:
Security (including authentication and authorization).Interfaces to infrastructure as a service.Platforms as a service.Deployment formats for cloud applications.Component descriptions.Data-exchange formats.Cloud computing taxonomies and reference models.The group will also focus on service-level agreements (SLAs), which continue to hamper early efforts to pilot cloud computing tests, said Soley.
In addition, one possible future activity for the Cloud Standards Coordination could be supporting the creation of cloud computing storefronts advocated by Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra. Kundra, who gave the keynote address at the cloud computing symposium, described an online storefront to be developed by the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) as a way of advancing the ability of agencies to procure computing-on-demand services.
The group's formation, according to information on the Web site, represents an outgrowth of coordination efforts by the Standards Development Organization Collaboration on Networked Resources Management working group.
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