Industry Standards for Cloud

An Introduction to The Cloud Industry Forum Standards Sub-Committee from its Chair, Ian Osborne.

Cloud Industry Forum Standards Watch,
Ian Osborne, December 2011

I am pleased to announce that the Cloud Industry Forum has established a Cloud Standards working group comprising interested members, chaired by me. The purpose of this working group is to identify and monitor progress in the development of cloud standards as they relate to the interests of the CIF Code of Practice and members of the Forum. Broadly speaking, we believe that relevant standards are important to improving the maturity of the cloud services on offer today and that in many cases they will bring benefits of increased flexibility and security for subscribing users. Rather than getting directly engaged in standards creation, we have decided to rely on watching for important developments in the marketplace via Members of the Cloud Industry Forum, keeping up to date through participation in standards development driven by their users and business needs. This way we hope to be able to provide genuine insight as to changes in the market driven by user requirements.

We will provide regular updates as to the status of significant standards developments on this website. We will also be developing a map of standards activities over the next month or two which will help prospective users and industry members to locate their business interests. We will only be directly engaging in these activities where they are strategic to the interests of the CIF Code of Practice. Initial examples include International Standards Organisation with a large amount of coordinated work underway, Cloud Security Alliance, which we believe is the leading industry authority on cloud security at present, and an initiative related to the publication of audit reports, under the TPAC programme. Further information in due course.

If you have a specific question regarding Cloud Standards and how they relate to your business, either as a consumer of services or as a provider of services. Please don't hesitate to contact me Ian@cloudindustryforum.org.

If you are interested in becoming a member of Cloud Industry Forum and contributing to the work of this group, please contact breda@cloudindustryforum.org

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An Introduction to Cloud Standards

In this webinar, Ian Osborne discusses the role of standards in the development of Cloud regulatory framework.

Watch the webinar here.

Cloud Computing Industry Initiatives

Cloud Computing touches many different aspects of Information and Communications Technology. Worldwide we see a number of national and international Cloud Computing initiatives: from industry consortia to formal standardization organizations. Sometimes these initiatives are focusing on specific viewpoints of Cloud Computing, while at other times they deal with Cloud Computing architectures or use cases.

In this report we have investigated several of these initiatives and Table 1 shows a summary of current Cloud Computing industry initiatives at the time of this report. Follow the link for more information on a specific initiative.

Table 1: Cloud Computing Industry Standards Initiatives (adapted from the ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC38 SGCC Study Group report)