Appendix A. Intercloud Standards Organizations and Industry Bodies
Many cloud computing standards organizations or committees have been formed in order to address cloud issues such as adoption, security, interoperability, brokerage, and a host of other items related to cloud services. Also, there are organizations that produce best practices for service delivery, business processes, and operations that are widely adopted by enterprises and service providers worldwide. In this appendix, we provide both types of cloud standards organizations. A standards organization is an organization whose primary activities are developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpreting, and otherwise producing technical standards that are intended to address the needs of some relatively wide base of affected adopters. An industry body has a focus in a particular area where the output is NOT a standard. The output may be transmitted to a standards organization to produce a technical standard.
International Standards Organizations
IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) has produced two working drafts: IEEE-SA Working Group (Cloud Profile): P2301, and IEEE-SA Working Group (Intercloud): P2302.
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards dealing in particular with standards of the Internet Protocol suite. There are several documents on cloud reference framework.
ISO/IEC JTC1/SC38 is a cloud computing and distributed platforms standardization, including but not limited to
Service-oriented architecture (SOA)
Service-level agreements (SLAs)
Interoperability and portability
Data and its flow across devices and cloud services
ITU-T (UN Organization) Study Group 13 in collaboration with industry worldwide has developed several documents on cloud architectures.
Global Industry
Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) develops and promotes best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing.
TeleManagement Forum (TMF) produces business processes and best practices, enterprise cloud operating models, and catalyst projects. There is a harmonization of terminology among TMF, ITIL, and ITU-T TMN.
North American Standards and Industry
ANSI T1M1 (American National Standards Institute, Telecom) publishes OAM&P standards applicable to the United States and makes recommendations to the ITU-T. Typically, contributions need to be made in T1M1 and then go from T1M1 to ITU-T.
Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) focuses on IaaS and providing standards that enable IaaS to be flexible, scalable, and high performance.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) supports U.S. government agencies for the adoption of cloud, and also for the industry, SDOs, cloud adopters, and policymakers.
SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) focuses on developing storage solution specifications and technologies, global standards, and storage education.
Open-Source Industry
Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) provides discussion forums for creating a framework that enables two or more cloud platforms to exchange information in a unified way.
Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) supports the development of standards for cloud computing and frameworks for interoperating between clouds. The OCC has a number of different working groups devoted to varying aspects of cloud computing.
Open Cloud Manifesto (OCM) initiates an open dialog among cloud vendors, enterprise application companies, and customers.
Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) focuses on open, secure, interoperable cloud solutions and transparent cloud service delivery.
Open Grid Forum (OGF) is an open community that focuses on horizontally scaled transactional systems supporting SOA as well as the cloud.
The Open Group (TOG) works with other industry bodies to facilitate cloud computing and its deployment in enterprises using open group architectures.
OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing a ubiquitous open-source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.
Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) Technical Committees address cloud authorization, topology and orchestration, and application management.
European Standards and Industry
Cloud Standards Coordination (CSC) was launched by ETSI and is tasked to coordinate with partakers in the cloud standards ecosystems and devise standards roadmaps in support of EU critical policy in areas such as security, interoperability, data portability, and reversibility.
European Technical Standards Institute (ETSI) has developed several technical specifications (TS) and technical reports (TR) in the area of cloud: TS 103 142 (cloud interoperability), TR 103 125 (cloud SLAs), and TR 102 997 (cloud services).
Open Computing Alliance (OCA)’s charter is to build a community of interested parties to address issues of mutual concern across the information and communications technologies sector, including the impact of the emergence of cloud computing. The OCA is currently focused on identifying issues and solutions related to procurement, competition, and interoperability.