End user group lists cloud computing demands

Ensuring compliance

The alliance hopes that this base level of requirements will eventually form industry standards that service providers can be audited against.

McGee told iTnews that the steering panel had discussed the potential to develop a “compliance tick of approval”, but hadn’t yet agreed on how it could be implemented.

“Ideally we’d like to have a certification body set up to do auditing against these standards,” said another member of the steering committee. “That could potentially ease the job of getting approval [for use of cloud computing] from regulators.”

McGee said that it might be impractical for “every customer to carry out compliance verifications with regulators” and that regulators might also “be reluctant to accept third party verifications.”

The most basic solution, he said, was to have a global, industry-wide agreement on common management and policy controls.

Working with industry

The ODCA also announced today the first vendor partners welcomed into the initiative, aside from Intel’s involvement as a technical steering partner.

Dell, EMC, Parallels and Red Hat were announced as industry partners.

The alliance hopes to convince vendor partners to “integrate guidance from these usage models into their product and service roadmaps.”

It also hopes to see its demands appearing in vendor products and services within 18 months.

If other users and the industry gets behind them, the alliance anticipate the initiatives could accelerate cloud adoption to the tune of US$50 billion, driving a 25 percent acceleration in adoption of services and driving down the cost of enterprise IT by some 15 percent.

McGee said that inviting vendor partners into the group had been approached with some trepidation.

"That was one of the things on my mind and the team at NAB – whether we were just getting a series of vendors driving it in their own direction," he said. "We’ve been very careful as we’ve taken each member on to make sure that they understand we want this as open as possible. So far we think we’ve been able to manage that well."