Cloud Computing Interface standards

A Good reference here:


Inventory of Standards Relevant to Cloud Computing

Certain commercial entities, equipment, or materials may be identified in this document in order to describe an experimental procedure or concept adequately. Such identification is not intended to imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, nor is it intended to imply that the entities, materials, or equipment are necessarily the best available for the purpose.
On this page, we gather the highest-level protocols, definitions and standards that area applicable widely to the cloud computing use cases identified elsewhere in this twiki. See also the list of related pages for standards that are applicable more specifically to the detailed breakdown of cloud computing areas and deployment models given in the NIST definition of cloud computing. Links to these pages appear at the bottom of the page.

Read the rest here: http://collaborate.nist.gov/twiki-cloud-computing/bin/view/CloudComputing/StandardsInventory

Other Cloud Computing News


Global CIO: FedEx CIO Explains The Real Power Of Cloud

New EU Agency Report on Governmental Cloud Computing Security in EU

BRUSSELS and HERAKLION : The EU's 'cyber security' Agency ENISA has launched a new report on Govermental Cloud Computing. The report is targeted at senior managers of public bodies who have to make a security and resilience decision about how to 'go cloud', if at all. The main goal of the report is to support governmental bodies in taking informed risk based decisions regarding security of data, resilience of service and legal compliance on their way to the cloud. It highlights also security and resilience pros and cons of community, private and public cloud computing services for public bodies.
"The new report presents a decision-making model for senior management to determine the best cloud solution from a security and resilience point of view", says Mr. Daniele Catteddu, author of the report. The report details and explains the different steps of the decision-making model, and applies the model to four sample services (electronic healthcare services, electronic administrative procedures, email, and human resources applications). Analysis and conclusions are mainly based on three scenarios, which describe the migration to cloud computing of a Healthcare Authority, a local public administration and the creation of governmental cloud infrastructure.
The Agency concludes that private and community clouds appear to be the solutions that best fit the needs of public administrations if they need to achieve the highest level of data governance. If a private or community cloud infrastructure does not reach the necessary critical mass, most of the resilience and security benefits of the cloud model will not be realised.
The Executive Director Prof. Udo Helmbrecht comments: "Public cloud offers a very high level of service availability, and is the most cost-effective. Yet, currently its adoption should be limited to non-sensitive or non critical applications, in the context of a well-defined cloud adaptation strategy with a clear exit strategy."
The report makes several recommendations to governments and public bodies, including:
- National governments and the EU institutions should investigate the
    concept of an EU Governmental cloud.

    - Cloud computing will soon serve a significant portion of EU citizens,
    SMEs and public administrations. National governments should thus
    prepare a cloud computing strategy and study the role that cloud
    computing will play for critical information infrastructure protection
    (CIIP).

    - A national cloud computing strategy should address the effects of
    national/supra-national interoperability and interdependencies, cascading
    failures, and include cloud providers into the reporting schemes of
    articles 4 and 13 of the new Telecom Framework Directive (
    http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/internal_market/single_market_services/l24216a_en.htm).
Read the full report and all recommendations: http://www.enisa.europa.eu/act/rm/emerging-and-future-risk/deliverables/securi ty-and-resilience-in-governmental-clouds/
(Due to the length of these URLs, it may be necessary to copy and paste these hyperlinks into your Internet browser's URL address field. Remove the space if one exists.)
The original and valid version of this release is the English. Translations are for the purpose of media distribution only, the English takes precedence over them in every detail.
SOURCE ENISA - European Network and Information Security Agency

Planning In The Cloud: How JDA Is Reshaping Supply Chain Management For Manufacturers

In the past 24 months the interest in cloud computing – a general term for software deployed via the Internet – has grown as a result of the economic downturn. Because manufacturers no longer have the luxury of lengthy implementations and face tighter budget restrictions, they are seeking solutions that provide faster time-to-value and lower cost of ownership.

While accessing physical computing resources and connections via the Internet is nothing new, the movement of more business applications, especially mission-critical ones, into the cloud is becoming more prevalent. This is difficult for many companies to fathom, but even large companies are now moving part of their application portfolios into the cloud.

Why would a company want to use cloud computing for their supply chain management applications? First, a brief understanding of cloud computing and the various delivery models for supply chain management is in order. Cloud computing refers to the infrastructure, applications and other capabilities that run over the Internet, outside of a company’s firewall, and that are accessible via a Web browser. Through cloud computing, supply chain management applications can be deployed through hosted, managed services and software as a service (SaaS) models.\

Source: Press Release

IBM leverages SugarCRM for SAAS cloud offering

IBM Partners with SugarCRM and Ariba
Collaboration reinforces IBM's commitment to cloud computing.

By Brittany Farb

As it looks to improve companies’ daily business interactions and effectiveness, IBM has announced new partnerships with SugarCRM and Ariba, as well as increased adoption of LotusLive public cloud services.

IBM also announced that the Australian Bureau of Statistics, C&D Foods, Crawford & Co., the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, General Milling, General Motors Components Holdings, and the Zoo and Aquarium Association of Australia will benefit from its cloud initiatives.

The announcements come as research shows cloud computing is on the rise. According to the IDC, worldwide spending on cloud services will grow almost threefold and reach $44.2 billion by 2013. In addition, a recent IBM survey of more than 2,000 companies revealed growing adoption of cloud computing among midsize firms. Two-thirds were either planning on or currently using cloud-based technologies.

“There is no dispute that the cloud is a very high gross area and a total game changer for the software space,” says Beverly DeWitt, director of LotusLive Partner Programs and Solutions at IBM. “All different parts of IBM are focused on a cloud-based delivery model. It’s a key strategic initiative not only for us but also for our competitors.”

Ariba is integrating LotusLive into Ariba Discovery, a free service that provides access to more than 350,000 sellers in more than 400 business categories. Ariba Discovery for LotusLive is expected to debut during the first half of this year and will enable buyers and sellers to hold Web conferences, participate in online conversations, and share documents.

SugarCRM, a provider of open-source CRM software, is integrating LotusLive into its customer relationship management application. The goal is to effectively collaborate with prospective and current customers during lead generation, lead-to-cash, and issue resolution processes. LotusLive provides integrated email, Web conferencing, social networking services, and collaboration tools through the IBM cloud.

“For both [IBM and SugarCRM], it enables us to alter a very powerful solution for sales organizations, marketing teams, and support organizations, whether that is a call center or non-traditional support through things like Twitter,” said Martin Schneider, senior director of communications at SugarCRM. “It’s really valuable, cost-effective, and will meet the changing needs of an individual or a team over time.”

Denis Pombriant, founder and principal analyst at Beagle Research Group, says the partnership is an “extension of IBM’s commitment to open source” that will benefit a wide range of companies.

“There seems to be a lot of synergy these days between IBM and the open-source movement,” Pombriant says. “For the first time it gives IBM a native CRM application that some of its older clients with older technology can take advantage of.”

Laurie McCabe, a partner at SMB Group, believes this collaboration is a “win-win” for businesses and customers. “IBM is definitely broadening the footprint,” she says. “This opens up the platform, making it easy for people to partner and integrate with LotusLive. It’s a big plus for the customers because they have more opportunities to integrate, as well.”

via http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/IBM-Partners-with-SugarCRM-and-Ariba-73486.aspx

Microsoft Unveils New Cloud-Based CRM Offering

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online helps government agencies reduce costs, improve citizen engagement and increase transparency

Microsoft on Tuesday showcased examples of how government organizations are using the recently announced Microsoft Dynamics CRM to improve citizen services, reduce operational costs and boost productivity. Unveiled yesterday by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is the cloud service of the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 solution that is helping both public and private-sector organizations respond to the people they serve efficiently.

Microsoft Research delivers cloud development kit for Windows Phone 7


By Mary Jo Foley


The new SDK is related to Project Hawaii, a mobile research initiative which I’ve blogged about before. Hawaii is about using the cloud to enhance mobile devices. The “building blocks” for Hawaii applications/services include computation (Windows Azure); storage (Windows Azure); authentication (Windows Live ID); notification; client-back-up; client-code distribution and location (Orion).

The SDK is “for the creation of Windows Phone 7 (WP7) applications that leverage research services not yet available to the general public,” according to the download page.

The first two services that are part of the January 25 SDK are Relay and Rendezvous. The Relay Service is designed to enable mobile phones to communicate directly with each other, and to get around the limitation created by mobile service providers who don’t provide most mobile phones with consistent public IP addresses. The Rendezvous Service is a mapping service “from well-known human-readable names to endpoints in the Hawaii Relay Service.” These names may be used as rendezvous points that can be compiled into applications, according to the Hawaii Research page.

The Hawii team is working on other services which it is planning to release in dev-preview form by the end of February 2011. These include a Speech-to-Text service that will take an English spoken phrase and return it as text, as well as an “OCR in the cloud” service that will allow testers to take a photographic image that contains some text and return the text. “For example, given a JPEG image of a road sign, the service would return the text of the sign as a Unicode string,” the researchers explain.

Microsoft officials said earlier this week that the company sold last quarter 2 million Windows Phone 7 operating system licenses to OEMs for them to put on phones and provide to the carriers. (This doesn’t mean 2 million Windows Phone 7s have been sold, just to reiterate.) Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 in October in Europe. There are still no Windows Phone 7 phones available from Verizon or Sprint in the U.S. Microsoft and those carriers have said there will be CDMA Windows Phone 7s on those networks some time in 2011.

via

IBM Cloudburst & Websphere Cloudburst appliance Vs Windows Azure™ platform appliance


IBM Cloudburst & Websphere Cloudburst appliance
Windows Azure™ platform appliance
Pre-Packaged HW/SW Solution. With Systems, Storage and Networking Support.

The Windows Azure platform appliance consists of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware.
VMWare is used for the Cloud Virtualization support.
Built on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and System Center, are a key part of Microsoft’s approach to cloud computing
WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1 provides new virtual images of the WebSphere Application Server (updated product versions and a packaging of the image for the PowerVM platform) as well as a DB2 Enterprise trial virtual image. This allows you to dispense both WebSphere Application Server and DB2 environments using the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance.
The Windows Azure platform Appliance consists of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of compute, network and storage resources located in third-party (non-Microsoft) datacenters. The Windows Azure platform Appliance enables service providers and large enterprises to run and manage Windows Azure and SQL Azure in their own datacenters.

Includes Tivoli Provisioning Manager – Automated end-to-end provisioning.

provisioning engine built on Windows Server and System Center