Cloud Standards Coordination

A collaborative approach

The CSC Report

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The final report from ETSI’s Cloud Standards Coordination initiative was made public on December 11,2013 in Brussels.

The report was delivered at an event jointly organized between ETSI and the European Commission attended by over 100 experts from the cloud community.

A quote by Neelie Kroes

“I am pleased that ETSI launched and steered the Cloud Standards Coordination (CSC) initiative in a fully transparent and open way for all stakeholders. Today's announcement gives a lot of hope as our European Cloud Computing Strategy aims to create 2.5 million new European jobs and boost EU GDP by EUR 160 billion by 2020.”
Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, December 11th, 2013.

The results

After an analysis of major aspects of cloud computing standardization, the final Report provides:
  • A definition of roles in cloud computing;
  • The collection and classification of over 100 cloud computing Use Cases;
  • A list of around 20 relevant organizations in cloud computing Standardization and a selection of around 150 associated documents, Standards & Specifications as well as Reports & White Papers produced by these organizations;
  • A classification of activities that need to be undertaken by Cloud Service Customers or Cloud Service Providers over the whole Cloud Service Life-Cycle;
  • A mapping of the selected cloud computing documents (in particular Standards & Specifications) on these activities.
On top of this, conclusions regarding the status of Cloud Standardization at the time of the writing have been developed, concerning general aspects (fragmentation, etc.) and more specific topics of Interoperability, Security & Privacy and Service Level Agreements.

The audience

The audience for the CSC report includes
  • Cloud service providers who should be able to use it to understand which standards and specifications they may wish to select and apply to their services.
  • Cloud service customers, who should be able, from knowing the standards and specifications applied by a cloud service provider, to understand how their requirements can be covered by the current and future offerings and to have confidence in the service offering.
  • All sizes of cloud service providers and cloud service customers from small businesses to public procurers and multinationals.
  • Administrations that have to act as cloud service customer.
  • Governmental authorities that have to act as cloud regulators.