Governments and businesses alike are looking at cloud services as a way to consolidate IT infrastructure, scale their IT systems for the future, and enable innovative services and activities that were not possible before.

To help organisations realise the benefits of cloud services, technology vendors are investing in the hard work of identifying and solving the challenges presented by operating in mixed IT environments and are collaborating to ensure that their products work well together.

In fact, although the industry is still in the early stages of collaborating on cloud interoperability issues, there has already been considerable progress. But what does “cloud interoperability” mean, and how is it benefiting people today?

http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/Collaborating-on-cloud-interoperability/4483/Default.aspx

With all the excitement around the cloud, Shank says it’s easy to lose sight of the payoff. “To be clear, cloud computing has enormous potential to stimulate economic growth and enable governments to reduce costs and expand services to citizens.”

In a recent InfoWorld article by Paul Krill, Vint Cerf, who is a co-designer of the Internet’s TCP/IP standards and widely considered a father of the Internet, spoke about the the need for data portability standards for cloud computing. “There are different clouds from companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and Google, but a lack of interoperability between them,” Cerf explained at a session of the Churchill Club business and technology organization in Menlo Park, Calif.

Interoperability has not been a huge focus around the quickly emerging cloud computing space. Other than “we support interoperability” statements from the larger cloud computing providers, there is not a detailed plan to be seen. I’ve brought it up several times at cloud user group meetings, with clients, and at vendor briefings, and I often feel like I’m the kid in class who reminds the teacher to assign homework.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/data-interoperability-challenge-cloud-computing-259

Cloud computing won’t have as much value unless we get the data-integration mechanisms right

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 24 /PRNewswire/ — The Open Group, a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium focused on open standards and global interoperability within and between enterprises, today announced the availability of two new industry standards: the Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model (OSIMM) and SOA Governance Framework. OSIMM will provide an industry recognized maturity model for advancing the continuing adoption of SOA and Cloud Computing within and across businesses. The SOA Governance Framework is a free guide for organizations to apply proven governance standards that will accelerate service-oriented architecture success rates.

Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model to Help Organizations Maximize Business Benefits from Their SOA and Cloud Adoptions

The standardization effort that was officially announced this week is already listed on that wiki: the Open Group Cloud Work Group. In a press release, The Open Group, described the group’s charter:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19413_3-10313404-240.html

let’s take the capabilities of something like SCAP and embed a standardized and open API layer into each IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offering (see the API blocks in the diagram below) to provide not only a standardized way of scanning for network vulnerabilities, but also configuration management, asset management, patch remediation, compliance, etc.

I find the Open Group’s thinking around the use of cloud computing in traditional enterprise architecture frameworks and in SOA more advanced than that of the other working groups and standards organizations I deal with.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/new-champion-preventing-vendor-lock-in-in-cloud-006

The Open Group is looking at architecture and interoperability issues in a good way. Let’s hope they succeed in helping the cloud evolve as it should

There are already several other industry efforts toward addressing identifiable issues with cloud deployments and services, but this latest is trying to make a unique contribution

http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/vpn/2009/081709cloudsec1.html?hpg1=bn

For example the group is looking at cloud security. First it sets the business implications of security breaches – misuse of confidential data and the loss of customer good will