Industry standard frameworks are a set of criteria within an industry relating to carrying out operations known as best practices; this is the best way that the operations should be set up and carried out. Best practice produces better results than a standard way of setting up the operations.

These industry standard frameworks are carried out by all members of that industry. In networking, the International Standard Organization (ISO) is responsible for the industry framework within communications and the IT industry. The ISO is a body comprised of international standards bodies that mainly look at communication.

Reference architecture is a document or a set of documents to which a project manager or other interested party can refer to for best practices; this will include documents relating to hardware, software, processes, specifications, and configurations, as well as logical components and interrelationships.

ISO/IEC 17789:2014 specifies the cloud computing reference architecture (CCRA). The reference architecture includes the cloud computing roles, cloud computing activities, and the cloud computing functional components and their relationships.