NIST Moves Forward on Cloud Computing

Recently the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) held their second Cloud Computing Forum and Workshop.

Skillfully shepherded by Ms. Dawn Leaf, the agency’s senior executive of cloud computing, the event reinforced the US Federal government's move towards the cloud.

Of particular note to me was the cloud computing simulation model project, known as Koala, that focuses on the behavior of infrastructure-as-a-service cloud systems. Other highlights included:

• A cloud computing standards panel moderated by Mike Hogan and Teresa Schwarzhoff
• Ms Cita M. Furlani, Director NIST Information Technology Laboratory, view of the cloud
• Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Khawaja S. Shams description of a cloud oriented architecture
• Dawn Leaf's overview of the NIST Cloud Computing Program
• Danielle Kriz of the Information Technology Industry Council presentation on global cloud computing security; and
• Jean-Francois Junger of the European Commision talk on Europe's digital agenda.

NIST also highlighted their work on cloud computing use cases. This set of twenty five use cases is being used to address portability, interoperability and security concerns within the cloud computing community:

NIST - Cloud Computing Use Cases

****WORKING DOCUMENT****

• Introduction
• Important Actors for Public Clouds
• Cloud Management Use Cases
  • 3.1 Open An Account
    3.2 Close An Account
    3.3 Terminate An Account
    3.4 Copy Data Objects Into a Cloud
    3.5 Copy Data Objects Out of a Cloud
    3.6 Erase Data Objects In a Cloud
    3.7 VM Control: Allocate VM Instrance
    3.8 VM Control: Manage Virtual Machine Instance State
    3.9 Query Cloud-Provider Capabilities and Capacities
• Cloud Interoperability Use Cases
  • 4.1 Copy Data Objects between Cloud-Providers
    4.2 Dynamic Operation Dispatch to laaS Clouds
    4.3 Cloud Burst From Data Center to Cloud
    4.4 Migrate a Queuing-Based Application
    4.5 Migrate (fully-stopped) VMs from one cloud-provider to another
• Cloud Security Use Cases
  • 5.1 Identity Management - User Account Provisioning
    5.2 Identity Management - User Authentication in the Cloud
    5.3 Identity Management - Data Access Authorization Policy Management in the Cloud
    5.4 Identity Management - User Credential Synchronizaton Between Enterprises and the Cloud
    5.5 eDiscovery
    5.6 Security Monitoring
    5.7 Sharing of Access to Data in a Cloud
• Future Use cases Candidates
  • 6.1 Cloud Management Broker
    6.2 Transfer of ownership of data within a cloud
    6.3 Fault-Tolerant Cloud GroupAppendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D

I applaud NIST and the Federal CIO Council for their leadership in this area.

Cross-posted from Cloud Musings