The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cloud Computing Program (NCCP) is forming three cloud computing public work groups to find solutions to cloud computing challenges. The public work groups will bring together industry, government, and academic experts from across the world to address requirements laid out in the “NIST U.S Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap Release” 1.0 (Draft).
One of the key challenges for cloud computing flagged in the roadmap concerns interoperability and portability. One work group to be called the “Interoperability and Portability for Cloud Computing” will identify the issues and types of interoperability and portability needed for cloud computing systems and the relationships and interactions between interoperability and portability.
In addition, the “Cloud Services Group” will address the roadmap’s requirement that consistently categorized cloud services are needed. Recently, dozens of new types of cloud services and acronyms have developed in the marketplace.
This new public work group will use the “NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture” to provide consistent categories of cloud services so buyers know what they are committing to before signing potentially costly, long term contracts.
The third work group will tackle the roadmap’s Requirement 5–Frameworks to support seamless implementation of federated community cloud environments. This group will define the term “federated cloud” and develop a path to its implementation.
Go to www.nist.gov/itl/cloud/announcement-of-three-new-wg.cfm for more information on participating in the work groups. For more on the NIST Cloud Computing Program, go to www.nist.gov/itl/cloud.