United Nations aims for cloud interoperability
February 10, 2012
The UN’s International Telecommunication Union creates a new group focused on standardising cloud computing. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has formed a new group to bring standards to the cloud computing industry.
The Working Party on Cloud Computing will begin by examining reports from an ITU focus group. The plan is to build on these initial findings and create formal recommendations for the ITU to offer the technology industry.
It will be led by Jamil Chawki, core network standard domain manager at France Telecom Orange, while Monique Morrow, a consultant engineer at Cisco, will act as the head of the Joint Coordination Activity for Cloud Computing and as a point of contact for other industry members keen to get involved with the work…
As well as the original report, the party will focus their work around three more topics:
- Cloud computing ecosystem, inter-cloud and general requirements
- Cloud functional architecture, infrastructure and networking
- Cloud computing resource management and virtualization
Each of these areas have been assigned to a telecoms executive to take control of the subject. The ecosystem will be handled by Kangchan Lee of the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in Korea, the functional architecture will be addressed by Mingdong Li from ZTE and the resource management question will be run by Richard C. Brackney of Microsoft.
“Cloud computing is an industry expected to grow at an annual growth rate of roughly 30 per cent,” read a statement from the ITU.
“However, concerns with the portability – freedom to transfer data between the clouds of different providers – and the interoperability of cloud solutions has led to calls for standardisation to fuel further industry growth.”
We contacted the ITU to find out the timetable for the new group but it hadn’t responded to our request at the time of publication. We will update the article when we receive more information.