Cloud Computing: More Research and Standards on the Way

Everybody loves the benefits of Cloud Computing, but potential issues with cloud computing like Security and loss of control are are also high on people’s radar, and the details of those issues are causing people a lot of worry.

A couple of weeks back we posted here about the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), a vendor-neutral group of companies banding together to develop standards and best practices around cloud computing.  Members of that group include companies like BMW, China Life, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Lockheed Martin.

But that is not the limit to the current activity aimed to address people’s concerns with cloud computing.  Now the European Union has invested €15.7 million in a group to further research issues associated with cloud computing.  Leading the effort will be IBM researchers based in Israel.  The project is called VISION (Virtualised Storage Services for the Future Initiative) Cloud.  Other members on the research team include 14 other partner companies, like SAP, Siemens, the National Technical University of Athens and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science.

VISION Cloud is attacking the problem of cloud data representations and the sharing of data between different cloud systems.  The idea is to encapsulate data into smart objects that can tell the handling system how the embedded data should be handled, replicated, or backed up.

The project will focus on the following four areas of research:

1. Rich object data model
2. Execution of computations close to the stored content
3. Content-centric access
4. Full data interoperability

Some of the questions that the team will try to address are how security can be restricted to just a priviledged few.  For example, how could a video be distributed via the internet yet available only for view by a restricted set of individuals.
Joe Clabby of Clabby Analytics said that this project “has some interesting elements such as the creation of storage objects and the creation of a centralized metadata database that essentially points to the data that people are seeking. And it has a security element (our biggest concern with clouds, just like with grids, is how do you secure data that is held in a public, open location).”

Dr. Hillel Kolodner, IBM’s lead architecture for the VISION Cloud project, said that “users now require capabilities that are far richer than simple raw bits and basic storage.  To satisfy this need, the focus must shift to the data — where the collections of bits are semantically meaningful and have associated metadata.”