Cloud Computing | News

Open Cloud Standards Council Draws Higher Ed

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 04/11/11

Four education institutions are showing up on the roster of participants in a new council to promote open cloud standards. The Cloud Standards Customer Council will work under the aegis of the Object Management Group (OMG) to advance cloud interoperability in areas such as security, data and application interoperability and portability, governance and management, and metering and monitoring.

Among the participants are North Carolina State University, Granada University, Jordan University of Science and Technology, and Ohio State University. Other council members include corporations, services and consulting firms, and cloud providers. The membership is free and open to qualifying organizations. Two-thirds of the meetings scheduled by the council for this year will be held in virtual forums.

According to a statement from founding member IBM, the council will complement vendor-led cloud standards efforts. Cloud standards for specific areas are under development by organizations including the Distributed Management Task Force, which focuses on systems management standards; the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, which drives open standards for global information flow; and the Open Group, which focuses on openness in enterprise architecture.

Some of the same participants are showing up on a list of supporters for the Open Cloud Manifesto, an eight-page anonymous document free for registration and published under a Creative Commons license. The paper is "dedicated to the belief that the cloud should be open."

The intent of the new council is to provide a forum where members can share their views on cloud computing and interoperability requirements based on their own experiences. This Council will also work to develop publicly available resources, including whitepapers, standards roadmaps, and feedback on reference architectures, implementations, and product direction. It will also get involved in standards efforts where necessary.

"End users confront the challenges of implementing cloud on a daily basis," said Richard Mark Soley, chairman and CEO of OMG. "The Cloud Standards Customer Council will bring together these cloud veterans into a community where they can discover and disseminate best practices for moving to and managing the cloud and help to drive standards across industry, both to end-users and vendors, to bring down costs and increase choice."