What are Cloud Standards?

Defining words

• Lying to the boss
• What is a Business Strategy?
• What is a Corporate Strategy?
• What is a Product-Market Strategy?
• What is a Business Unit Strategy?
• What is CRM?
• What is Architecture?
• What is Enterprise Information Architecture?
• What is Strategic Design?
• What are business benefits and value?
• What is DevOps?
• What is Cloud Computing?
• What is a Banking Multi-Channel Architecture?
• What is Gamification?
• What is Crowdsourcing?
• What is a Segment Strategy?
• What is a Business Model?
• What is an Operating Model?
• What is a Target Operating Model (TOM)
• What are Strategic Guiding Principles?
• What is Service Design?
• What is a Customer Archetype?
• What are Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants?
• What is technology-driven change?
• What is a Digital Footprint?
• What is a Potential Trend?
• What are Cloud Standards?
• What is VisaNet?
• What is User Context?
• What are IBM CCRA and CCMP?
• What is PCI DSS Compliance?

Cloud Standards are open standards that allow interoperability for cloud computing.  Standards give cloud computing consumers the ability to compose services across clouds and more choice about which cloud they deploy their applications to and not to be locked in.

The latter ideas about choice and freedom make standards of strategic concern.  This improves the position of cloud consumers vis-à-vis cloud suppliers.

The Openstack alliance provides open standards for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).  IaaS standards would be most important to the IT operations organizations and primarily includes Compute-as-a-Service, Storage-as-a-Service and Network-as-a-Service.

Cloud Foundry provides open standards for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).  PaaS standards would be most important to software developers and includes Lifecycle Management Services, Middleware application deployment and management, and Cloud Integration Services.

OASIS provides open standards for interoperability of applications in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Business-Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS).  Application interoperability standards are most important to user groups (and the IT groups that support them).  See Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA).

A good read about Openstack and OASIS is Eric Knorr’s  What IBM’s embrace of OpenStack really means in InfoWorld (March 2013).

IBM organizes its view on cloud computing and related open standards and provides guidance on how to build cloud solutions in its Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CCRA).  For Cloud Service Providers, in addition to basic Cloud Services, the CCRA adds a Common Cloud Management Platform (CCMP) which includes Operational Support Services (OSS) and Business Support Services (BSS).

Standards will also cover Cloud Consumer Services such as Cloud Service Integration tools, as well as Service Creation Tools for Cloud Service Creators.