Our Federal government has played an innovative role in SOA governance (see Federated Computing demands SOA Governance & Testing) and now they taking a leadership role in distilling the value of Cloud Computing.
James Urquhart recently wrote, Are the feds the first to a common cloud definition? James wrote that the "public sector is eager to get rid of data centers in order to focus funds and effort on delivering value to their respective 'customers.' ... it appears that SaaS and collaborative technologies stand to benefit greatly from this trend."
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, a nonregulatory arm of the Commerce Department, has developed a draft definition for federal use of cloud computing. James quotes Reuven Cohen, in that "cloud computing will be the de facto standard definition that the entire US government will be given ... In creating this definition, NIST consulted extensively with the private sector including a wide range of vendors, consultants and industry pundits..."
Here is what they came up with: "Cloud computing is a pay-per-use model for enabling available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is comprised of five key characteristics, three delivery models (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS), and four deployment models."
This is just the opening to the definition and James provides the details on the five key characteristics, three delivery models, and four deployment models in his post. The definition statement acknowledges that it will evolve over time, but it tries to capture all of what is considered the cloud for now. This is a noble and useful effort. We have been writing a bit on one of these key characteristics, rapid elasticity. This can promote the cloud's use for application development and testing.
Thanks to the NIST for taking the lead here. I hope it can speed the use of the cloud within both defense and civilian branches of the government to maximize the efficiency of technology investments.
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