Cloud computing needs standards

Development of cloud computing led to powerful pushing by the large companies - IT leading, to creation of cloud standards concerning such aspects as data security, their portability.

Recently created group on work on standards supported by IBM - Cloud Standards Customer Council, at the beginning of a month announced the beginning of work of the committee. The general idea penetrating these efforts is obvious - the business community needs standards. However it is unclear - these numerous pushes to their development will become acceleration of development and the competition or will lead to the conflicts in approaches which in turn lead to accidents.

The different groups developing cloud standards in fact are integrated by key feature – trade and purchasing business. For example, in members of Cloud Standards Customer Council Citigroup, Costco Wholesale, and Deere & Co enter. The alliance Open Data Center Alliance created earlier among the members has such companies as JPMorgan Chase, BMW and Deutsche Bank, and Cloud Security Alliance includes in the list of members of Coca-Cola and eBay.

Marvin Wheeler, the executive director on the strategy of Terremark company, the chairman and the secretary of alliance Open Data Center Alliance said that the alliance intends to develop the broadest cooperation with all organizations. He considers that development of standards by several groups should be competitive, they should supplement each other. Numerous efforts can help all groups with achievement of their purposes, he added.

Open Data Center Alliance also hopes for use of force for a market change of cloud computing. The organization develops use models for vendors of cloud solutions. As expected, the alliance uses models at negotiation with vendors. The alliance also claims that his members represent power from more than $100 billion. IT expenses in a year.

Among those who consist in Cloud Standards Customer Council - North Carolina State University. Sam Averitt, the former head of the university Center of laboratory of virtual calculations, told that at the moment time his concern would be much bigger if there was only one such group. The cloud market, according to him, is so big and various that needs different views. "Everything moves to convergence process, and over time will well work if everything is made correctly", - Averitt told, referring to the previous agreements on networking standards.

However concerning existence of standards, especially in the field of security, Averit is unshakable: standards are necessary to guarantee integrity and data consistency, transferred from a cloud to a cloud. Control facilities are especially important, considers Averit. The policy of audit should be performed by the hardware allowing conducting examination to define where information who had to it access went, he emphasized.

Executing a management activity, the agencies, in particular, should be sure that they implement rather high level of security, but tests of this kind in reality do not exist yet, noted Averit.