Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Will the physical location of the new provider present any issues relating to the legalities
of moving data to the new provider?
Will the end users get a similar interface to use your company's cloud services?
How will the end users react to the new change?
There are no straight answers to these questions. And the reason is simple: if there is a
lack of standards, the process of moving from one cloud provider to another can be painful,
hard, complicated, expensive, and tedious. It could very well be akin to or even harder than
building everything from ground up, only because the old and new cloud provider had offer-
ings that were incompatible. In the worst case, which is not so unimaginable, your company
could lose most of its customers and be forced out of business.
Cloud standards, like other standards in computing, are meant to resolve incompatibility
issues and present solutions. However, interoperability, compatibility, and standardization
among different providers are not easy issues to resolve. It is highly unlikely that all of the
providers will come to the table agreeing upon a given set of cloud computing standards.
One of the major reasons for this is that each provider often uses its own set of principles
as opposed to the proposed standards.
Moreover, as with computing standardization drives of the past, the standards that
will govern cloud computing in the future are at a nascent stage of development. And as
we have experienced in the past with the World Wide Web, the Internet, network technol-
ogies, and so on, it will take time—probably years—for the standards to get developed,
adopted, and evolved.
Current Ad Hoc Standards
The interesting thing about computing is that technology development is leaps ahead of
technology standardization. This holds true for cloud computing as well, which itself is at
an early stage of evolution. However, there is no shortage of ad hoc standards for cloud
computing proposed by different organizations. Some of these are mentioned here.
NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap The National Institute of Standards and
Technology is a U.S. federal agency that operates under the U.S. Department of Commerce.
NIST works toward promoting standards in science and technology. To advocate for the
use of specific cloud computing best practices and standards for official/government use,
NIST has published the Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap.
www.nist.gov/manuscript-publication-search.cfm?pub_id=909024
IEEE Standards Association Working Groups The Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE) Standards Association develops and advances worldwide technologies.
IEEE has set up two specialized working groups for cloud computing standards and interop-
erability. The P2301 workgroup ( http://standards.ieee.org/develop/project/2301
.html ) is involved in standardizing cloud management and portability with the use of vari-
ous interfaces and file formats. The P2302 workgroup ( http://standards.ieee.org
/develop/project/2302.html ) is focused on interoperability and federation.
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