Digitization of the international economy

Introduction

The digitization of the international economy, as well as the society, affects all sectors. That is the reason nations find it necessary to maintain their competitiveness in the area of information technology. Having common Information and Communications Technology (ICT) standards is one of the ways necessary to ensure that industries take the lead in the development and exploitation of ICT technologies: they make sure that there is interoperability and guarantee that such technologies can work seamlessly and reliably together. This is becoming increasingly imperative as many more devices are being connected to each other including cars and transportation systems, appliances and eHealth systems among others. In this paper, a discussion of the cloud computing standards in the US and Europe are discussed including a comparison and a contrast of these standards.

Cloud Computing Standards in the USA

The market power of USA’s proprietary industry standards is making its providers to exert the greatest influence on cloud computing standardization (Carlsson & Paulsson, 2007). A pioneering role in the US cloud computing standardization is played by NIST (National Institute of Standards Technology) of the US administration: it is the first body to come up with a standardization guideline for cloud computing. Even though there are many other standardization bodies in the US, an overwhelming majority of them are reluctant to focus on cloud computing standards (Carlsson & Paulsson, 2007). NIST has come up with the cloud computing standards for interoperability, security, and portability.

Cloud Computing Standards for Interoperability

As the standardization of cloud interfaces are becoming more mature than in the past, commonalities among the cloud provider interfaces can be helpful in understanding the major interoperability needs and characteristics. The cloud user leverages the Management Interface to control his/her use of the cloud service such as starting, stopping or manipulating the virtual machine images as well as the associated resources. The self-service management interface is a good candidate for interoperability standardization, and many efforts have been made towards the same. The Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) from the Open Grid Forum is a good example of an IaaS resource management interface standard. Another standard in this area is the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) standard for both the storage management interface and storage functional interface (Hogan, Liu, Sokol, & Tong, 2011). Other in this area includes OAGi BODS for business documents and OOXML for office productivity documents.

Cloud Computing Standards for Portability

The rapid deployment of virtual infrastructure has increased the popularity of packaging, transportation, and deployment of pre-configured as well as ready-to-run systems such as operating systems and all needed applications into the virtual machines (Hogan, Liu, Sokol, & Tong, 2011). The presence of a standard, a portable meta-data model that can allow the distribution of the virtual machines between virtualization as well as cloud platforms can enable portability of these packaged workloads on multiple cloud computing platforms. An example of standards in this area is the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) that was developed by the Distributed Management Task Force to address portability issues between multiple virtualization platforms. There are also federated identity standards for authenticating services, and these include SAML and OAuth; and other standards for managing the virtualized environments.

Cloud Computing Standards for Security

The core cyber security objectives that include ensuring confidentiality, availability, and integrity of information and information systems are fundamental as they are the high-priority concerns and as well as perceived risks associated with cloud computing (Sokol & Hogan, 2013). One of the key security standards in this area is the X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Proxy Certificate Profile (RFC3820) from the Internet Engineering Task Force. This defines a standard technique of production for proxy certificates such as the ability to support extended feature certificates that conform to an external profile (Hogan, Liu, Sokol, & Tong, 2011).. These certificates can be useful in conveying delegation information as well as policy restrictions for the utilization of PKI-based credentials, especially in remote settings.

Cloud Computing Standards in Europe

In Europe, EuroCloud and ETSI are the most influential bodies for developing standards. There are large gaps in cloud computing standardization in Europe, and this presents a great potential for development. The European Commission is making huge attempts to cut through the jungle of technical standards to allow the cloud users to enjoy interoperability, data portability as well as reversibility based on its European Cloud Strategy of 2012 (European Commission, 2017). The Commission’s Cloud Standards Coordination Phase 1 was conducted in 2013, and it mainly addressed the cloud computing standards guideline. The results of this phase were presented din a workshop that was organized by the European Commission in December 2013. The initiative attracted several players from the cloud industry, public authorities, and around 20 standards setting bodies to collaborate towards the achievement of this objective.

Part of the commissions imitative was the formation of the Cloud-for-Europe (C4E) initiative with the aim of assisting Europe’s public authorities to procure cloud products and services that can enable them to build trust in cloud computing. The final report of the CSC initiative report provides a definition of the roles of cloud computing, a set of and classification of more than 100 cloud computing cases, and a list of about 20 relevant corporations in the cloud computing standardization as well as a selection of around 150 related documents, standards, and specification and Reports and white papers produced by these corporations (Muscella et al., 2012). The report also contains a classification of the activities that should be undertaken by the Cloud Service Customers or the providers over the entire Cloud Service Life-Cycle; and a mapping of some cloud computing documents (that is, standards and specifications) on those documents.

Since there are no specific cloud computing standards in Europe, a key responsibility lies with the European business community. The European business community should play a more active responsibility in the standardization to assert its core interests in the area of cloud computing. Similarly, there is also a need for the government to develop policies because that is the only way that can aid in preventing the possibility of a market failure at an early phase. The cloud computing should not be an area where there is unclear or open legal situation; it simply provides several opportunities for growth when the right framework is established Bernnat et al., 2012). Therefore, a quick action is necessary because the major decisions on the cloud standards are likely to be realized soon.

Conclusion

The paper has examined the industry standards in the USA and Europe in the area of cloud computing. From the research, it is clear that the USA has clear standards and is continually developing more cloud computing standards as compared to Europe which does not have clear cloud computing standards. It is thus necessary for Europe to work with its standardization organizations to develop cloud computing standards to allow for more security, portability, and interoperability of the cloud computing services and resources.

References

Bernnat, R., Zink, W., Bieber, N., Tai, S., Strach, J., & Fischer, R. (2012). The standardisation environment for cloud computing. Short Version. Online abrufbar unter.

Carlsson, B., & Paulsson, T. (2007). Information and Communication Technology Sector Developments in European and United States Metropolitan Areas. Entrepreneurship and Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy, 216-235.

European Commission (2017). European Cloud strategy 2012.

Hogan, M., Liu, F., Sokol, A., & Tong, J. (2011). Nist cloud computing standards roadmap. NIST Special Publication, 35.

Muscella, S., Ferguson, N., Parker, S., Badia, R. M., Lezzi, D., Wallom, D.,... & Walker, M. A. (2012). SIENA: Grid and Cloud Standards for e-Science and beyond.

Sokol, A. W., & Hogan, M. D. (2013). NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap. Special Publication (NIST SP)-500-291r2.

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