Cloud Standards Move Forward with Release of Service Specs

There is no doubt that without a clear set of standards, cloud computing will cease to reach its full potential. A new specification aims to help bring cloud applications and IT services to a new level by outlining standards for the industry.

A group of technology companies, including Cisco (News - Alert), Citrix, EMC and IBM, have released  Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA), ultimately to “substantially enhance” the portability of cloud applications and the IT services that comprise them running on software and hardware infrastructure. The standard effort is being overseen by the group OASIS.

The specification is intended to go a step further than current standardization efforts such as CDMI or OVF, according to Tech Week Europe, by including high-level elements such as server and storage requirements as well as management policies in a “service template.”

Standardizing service templates will support the creation of a market for hosted IT services, according to OASIS.

“The OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee will advance an interoperability standard that will make it easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in, while maintaining application requirements for security, governance, and compliance,” according to a statement released this week.

Having open standards will ultimately result in an increase of the speed of adoption and add a new level of flexibility, OASIS officials said.

“By improving service and application portability in a vendor-neutral ecosystem, TOSCA will streamline the migration of existing applications to the cloud as well as cloud-bursting,” said Paul Lipton of CA (News - Alert) Technologies, co-chair of the OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee. “It could also facilitate the evolution towards more dynamic, multi-cloud provider applications.”

The current version of the TOSCA specification was jointly authored by Capgemini, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, IBM, NetApp, PwC, Red Hat, SAP (News - Alert), Software AG, Virtunomic, and WSO2.

There are other standards efforts underway for cloud such as NIST and FedRAMP for public sector cloud initiatives. In addition, the Cloud Security Alliance has published 13 domain area recommendations for cloud computing, part of the maturing cloud landscape that helps enterprises figure out how to keep their clouds secures and available.

In June 2011, the PCI (News - Alert) Security Standard Council’s Virtualization Special Interest Group issued an information supplement titled “PCI Virtualization Guidelines,” a step forward for the development of industry standards. In addition, last fall, the National Institute of Standards and Technology issued its guidelines for cloud computing security – the first edition of a cloud computing standards roadmap and a cloud computing reference architecture.

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