Standardisation is seen as a strong enabler, bringing more confidence to users, especially SMEs, public administration and governments. Interoperability is fundamental for cross-border government services. 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 from vendor lock-in, thus avoiding significant migration costs incurred when open interfaces are not provided. Standards are one of the most important means used to bring new technologies to the market.
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.
Research by the HTML5Apps project reveals that a significant number of HTML5 standards have the potential to play an important role in Cloud technology, but this is not widely known due to a “communication gap” between the Web and the Cloud communities.
The sixth cloud interoperability workshop, being the last of such workshops under the auspices of the CloudWATCH project, brought together the results and outcomes of all previous workshops, the work conducted in WP2, and in other tasks in WP4. Through the numerical analysis conducted in WP2, which has also brought an online self assessment tool to life, WP4 was able to take the project clustering further and formulate three straw man standard profile documents that bring together standards addressing the respective needs of self assessment participants.
Interoperability is a basic requirement for cloud services. It fosters fair competition and is fundamental to integrating components, so that an ongoing innovation process is possible. But interoperability demands common technical and legal parameters, which are related to open standards and governance.
The Cloud Interoperability Plugfest series (or "Cloud Plugfests" for short) originated out of community-based interoperability efforts by a variety of organizations in 2011 and was further developed into a cooperative venue to exchange information and to encourage interoperability on implementations of relevant cloud standards.
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.
The fourth workshop continued the successful collaboration with the CloudPlugfest initiative in trying a new format in attracting community interest and commitment. As a venue, the UCC 2014 event in London provided the perfect audience, and the workshop was well attended.
With the first workshop already initiating a seed portfolio focusing on the technical interoperability of Cloud services, the second workshop aimed at extending the reach to EC-funded cloud related projects from FP7 Call 8 & Call 10 and others. To this extent, the workshop was embedded into the DG CONNECT E2 concertation meeting held in Brussels in March 2014.
The Cloud in Practice Programme is aimed at gathering the experts most likely to help set up successful cloud operations. The first workshop on 12 December 2012 addressed the issue of standards. The Commission pointed out that a successful cloud in Europe must serve the main objectives of the Digital Agenda and fit existing and future legal frameworks concerned. Three drivers in particular will inform this success: standards and certification; contracts; procurement.
The first workshop was held at the EGI Technical Forum in Madrid in September 2013 aimed at defining principles and specifications for the creation of an open schema to certify organisations and services against existing Cloud requirements and technical Cloud profiles. The workshop was based on existing material, such as ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 17021:2011, ISO/IEC 27006:2011, ISO 19011, existing cloud specific certification schema, such as NIST FedRAMP, and under development and cloud specific certification schemas such as Cloud Security Alliance Open Certification Framework.
Copyright 2016 CloudWATCH2 has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme - DG CONNECT Software & Services, Cloud. Contract No. 644748
