Whereas healthcare IT can boast inter-operability standards in the form of HL7 compliant standards that regulate the transmission of structured, electronic health data, the cloud computing space has yet to finalize analogous protocols for the exchange of data. As a result, the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has become one of several organizations pushing for cloud computing inter-operability standards that promise to enable customers to avoid vendor lock-in or inaccurate transformations of their data resulting from data migration from one vendor to another. Featuring a steering committee composed of representatives from BMW, Capgemini, China Life, China Unicom, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, Inc., National Australia Bank, Terremark, The Walt Disney Company and UBS, the Open Data Center Alliance represents enterprise customers whose annual spending on IT totals $100 billion. In an effort to accelerate the adoption of cloud inter-operability standards, on June 7, the ODCA elaborated eight use cases and a vision of inter-operable cloud computing that is intended to spur standards bodies to collaborate with vendors to define a set of standards across the industry. Topics addressed by four of the eight use cases include:
•Cloud Provider Security Assurance and Security Monitoring
•Standardized Units of Measurement for IaaS to enable meaningful comparisons of price and functionality across vendors
•Environmental standards regarding the CO2 footprint of cloud computing products and services
•Technical architecture of virtual machine inter-operability and I/O controls
More generally, the use cases address the topics of secure federation, automation, common management, policy transparency and solution transparency. The Open Data Center Alliance has pledged to share these uses cases with the Cloud Security Association (CSA), The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) and TM Forum’s Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council (ECLC).
Cloud Computing Today 