JUL 25, 2013 08:00 AM
 | It's the High-Tech Wild, Wild West out there! Although the Cloud Computing marketplace is still chaotic, it is:
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Being locked-in by a cloud provider is not what customers plan to experience. So, let’s explore a bit more on the cloud portability and interoperability topic.
The Open Cloud Manifesto explains data and applications interoperability and portability as follows:
- Data and Application Portability: "Without standards, the ability to bring systems back in-house or choose another cloud provider will be limited by proprietary interfaces. Once an organization builds or ports a system to use a cloud provider’s offerings, bringing that system back in-house will be difficult and expensive."
- Data and Application Interoperability: "It is important that both data and applications systems expose standard interfaces. Organizations will want the ?exibility to create new solutions enabled by data and applications that interoperate with each other regardless of where they reside (public clouds, private clouds that reside within an organization’s ?rewall, traditional IT environments or some combination). Cloud providers need to support interoperability standards so that organizations can combine any cloud provider’s capabilities into their solutions."
The Open Group, which provides recommendations to:
- Customers on how best to achieve portability and interoperability when working with cloud products and services
- Suppliers and standards bodies on how standards and best practice should evolve to enable greater portability and interoperability in future.
Please refer Table 1 and Table 2 for a concise presentation on cloud portability and interoperability categories listed by The Open Group.
Table 1. Cloud Portability Categories.
| Portability of | Enables Re-Use of |
|---|---|
| Data |
|
| Application |
|
| Platform |
|
Table 2. Cloud Interoperability Categories.
| Interoperability of | Between | Need of |
|---|---|---|
| Application | Application components deployed as:
| Dynamic discovery and composition:
|
| Platform | Platform components deployed as:
| Standard protocols for service discovery and information exchange — indirectly these enable interoperability of applications on these platforms. |
| Management |
| Standard interfaces for cloud services — to create generic system management products for both cloud services and in-house systems. |
| Publication and Acquisition |
| Standard interfaces to these stores — to lower cost of for software provideers and users. |
Irena Bojanova, Ph.D., is Founder and Chair of IEEE CS Cloud Computing STC, an Associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, an Associate editor of International Journal of Big Data Intelligence (IJBDI), and an Editorial Board Member of IEEE CS IT Professional. She is a professor and program director, Information and Technology Systems, at University of Maryland University College, managed academic programs at Johns Hopkins University and PIsoft Ltd., and co-started OBS Ltd., (now CSC Bulgaria). Her current research interests include cloud computing, web-based systems, and educational innovations. She is a member of the IEEE and can be reached ibojanova@umuc.edu.
