The Impact of Standards on the Hybrid Cloud

We think that you will agree that standards, whether developed by SDOs or through the de facto method, play an important role in cloud computing and in a hybrid cloud model. In a hybrid world, there are many interfaces between those that exist at your cloud provider and your applications, data, servers, and so on. This state of affairs means that security is a risk in many places. These can include areas where it’s costly to interoperate and where you can get bogged down and limit your options in terms of cloud providers. Standards let you do the following:

Move your infrastructure or applications from one cloud provider to another. This means you don’t have to rewrite code. In a hybrid world, where you may have part of the resources associated with an application on your own premises and part with a cloud provider, this capability is important because it enables your organization to be more flexible about where your resources might be located.

Prevent vendor lock-in. We talk about this earlier in the chapter. Lock-in occurs when you are so entrenched with a particular provider and its interfaces that moving to another provider is too costly. Removing barriers to lock-in improves your choices.

Integrate applications more easily between your on-premises data center and private and public cloud environments. Let’s face it, integrating your assets across multiple environments can be time-consuming and costly if every cloud provider has a proprietary model. Standards help to make integration easier and eliminate many common barriers.

Open Cloud Manifesto: The notion of an open cloud is so critical to the long-term success of the cloud that more than 200 vendors have already signed on to support a document called the Open Cloud Manifesto (www.opencloud manifesto.org ). The group, formed in 2009, realizes that although the cloud presents a great opportunity, a series of challenges must be overcome. These challenges include security, interoperability, portability, management, metering, and governance. The manifesto has a series of statements related to standards.