Standardisation is seen as a strong enabler, bringing more confidence to users, especially SMEs. Consumers are increasingly concerned about the lack of control, interoperability and portability, which are central to avoiding vendor lock-in, whether at the technical, service delivery or business level, and want broader choice and greater clarity.
Open standards can protect consumers and are one of the most important means used to bring new technologies to the market. From a consumer’s point of view, uptake and even enforcement of public open standards offers a number of benefits over industry standards due to impartial public copyrights and associated IPR policies. As a consequence, public open standards offer protection from vendor lock-in and licensing issues, therefore avoiding significant migration costs if not provided.
CloudWATCH is proactively supporting standards adoption and has compiled a cloud standard guide which gives information on the main cloud standards for portability, interoperability and security. CloudWATCH has also identified the main areas where standards are missing.
A major objective of CloudWATCH is to identify a metholodology for establishing cloud standards profiles around the federation of cloud services. CloudWATCH has delivered 3 straw man cloud standard profiles based on a portfolio of European and international use cases covering technical, policy and legal requirements.
This page contains all related standards profile work as well as more information on the benefits of standards adoption.
Cloud Computing has reached virtually all areas of society and its impact on service development, production, provision and consumption is manifold and far-reaching.
An intrinsic property of the innovation cycle is time: It requires time to let innovations settle in their current state, Cloud Interoperability Plugfests are facing serious challenges for relevance.
The CloudWATCH series of projects has supported and facilitated standards development in the European ICT landscape during the entire existence of the projects. Drawing from the decade-long experience of its experts over the more than four years of its duration, CloudWATCH recommends the following actions for future projects and policy makers alike:
CloudWATCH2 organised a panel-driven conversation about the business case for the adoption of cloud standards (and standards at large) at the CloudWATCH2 summit 2017, which at the same time marked the project’s final event on 19/20 September 2017.
The IT security standards landscape is particularly complex compared to other areas of standardisation - the EC’s ambition to “cut through the jungle of standards” has never been more true anywhere else than in this problem space.
Brazil and Europe have a long-standing, international relationship, including joint investments in IT through coordinated calls. Cloudscape Brazil 2015, 1-2 December 2015, celebrates some of the success stories to date, sharing insights on co-operation results tackling social challenges leveraging an EU-Brazil federated cloud infrastructure.
Cloud computing has now reached a point where it is truly accessible to all types of organisations and pretty much a staple in the start-up culture ...
Cloud Standards Coordination
In December 2012, the European Commission (EC) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) launched the Cloud Standardization Coordination (CSC) initiative.
Cloud platforms should make it possible to securely and efficiently move data in, out, and among cloud providers and to make it possible to port applications from one cloud platform to another. According to NIST cloud portability means that data can be moved from one cloud system to another and that applications can be ported and run on different cloud systems at an acceptable cost.
A truly interoperable cloud will encourage potential cloud customers to on-board, safe in the knowledge that they can change providers, or use multiple providers, without significant technical challenges or effort. This will expand the size of markets in which cloud providers operate. Additionally, if standards are suitably defined, the unique selling propositions of cloud providers can all be exposed.
Cloud Service Level Agreements (Cloud SLAs) form an important component of the contractual relationship between a cloud service customer and a cloud service provider of a cloud service. Given the global nature of the cloud, SLAs usually span many jurisdictions, with often varying applicable legal requirements, in particular with respect to the protection of the personal data hosted in the cloud service. Furthermore different cloud services and deployment models will require different approaches to SLAs, adding to the complexity of SLAs.
The European Commission has recently stated that widespread adoption of cloud computing would be crucial for improving productivity levels in the European economy, and that Europe should aim to be the world’s leading “trusted cloud region.” However, people are concerned and security in the cloud remains one of the largest barriers to the cloud.
The Open Grid Forum is an open global community committed to driving the rapid evolution and adoption of modern advanced applied distributed computing, including cloud, grid and associated storage, networking and workflow methods. The output products that result from this process codify best practices and standards that provide the basis for some of the largest and most powerful operational computing infrastructure systems in the world.
Market sector targets
At the Cloud Plugfest December 2014 in London, Primeur Magazine (original article) had the opportunity to interview Alan Sill from Texas Tech University. Alan Sill is Director of the National Science Foundation Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center in the USA.
CloudWATCH builds on a decade of collaborative peer work in Europe and globally, including the SIENA Roadmap and the evolution towards the EGI Federated Cloud infrastructure platform, bringing considerable expertise in standards development, implementation and interoperability testing.
Copyright 2016 CloudWATCH2 has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme - DG CONNECT Software & Services, Cloud. Contract No. 644748
