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Cloud Computing: Are Cloud Standards Standardizing the Cloud?
The adoption of standards for a particular market can be a good thing. The ISO standards body, for example, notes some of the benefits of standards are that they can help make business operations more efficient, they can result in overall lower costs for consumers, they can increase productivity, and they can help companies access new markets.
Currently many agree that the the introduction of cloud standards would be beneficial for the cloud. For example, some think that the lack of industry-wide security standards is slowing business adoption of cloud services. This desire for cloud standards has caused a flurry of work to be done in drafting them. A study by Booz & Company found that there are as many as 160 different standards covering different aspects of the cloud currently being deployed or under consideration. But too many standards, or competing and overlapping standards can have its own set of problems. Too many standards can lead to confusion.
And not everyone agrees on the importance of cloud standards. Toby Clarke, IT director at insurance specialist Abbey Protection Group in the UK, for one, believes that while standards can be useful, the lack of them shouldn’t necessarily scare away businesses from using the cloud. He told Mark Samuels of CloudPro that “not having standards works. The cloud should be all about flexibility and layers of technical standards are not necessarily helpful. It would be helpful if there was one standard for cloud across all suppliers. But there is no single definition, so what we have right now are not standards but offerings… Creating standards for the cloud is not as simple as putting out an agreed technical specification for something physical, like category 5 cabling. Specifications for cloud vary between organisations.”
James Staten, analyst at Forrester, thinks that cloud standards, like for a common API for the cloud are a long ways off. Staten told TechTarget’s SearchCloudComputing that “there is no compelling reason to comply; not enough enterprise users have established cloud computing initiatives.”
And once a standard is written, there’s also the problem of evaluating the quality and usefulness of it. For exmaple, the Booz report warns that a majority of the cloud ‘standards’ work today are being driven by IT vendors who are likely to benefit by writing a standard in a way that favors their technology strengths. The Booz report notes that “the chief responsibility for ensuring the success of open standards lies with the community of current and future customers of cloud computing—including enterprises both large and small. Without their active engagement in the process, their need for effective and affordable cloud computing services may be subsumed by the IT industry’s temptation to provide off-the-shelf proprietary solutions that have the added effect of locking customers into their services.”
