Standards

Standards play an important role in the realization of cloud services. For all management systems, such as customer care systems, service provisioning/configuration systems, service assurance systems, and billing/charging systems, to work together in a seamless way from end-to-end in a multivendor environment, standards need to be in place to quickly integrate many of these systems.

Why do we need standards in cloud computing? If you want to have some capabilities reside in your own private cloud and want to rely on some capabilities from other clouds, for example, interoperability between the systems in your cloud and other clouds is required. Furthermore, to have interoperability between systems, open interfaces are required. Otherwise, custom interfaces have to be developed every time (which is very expensive), and after that is done, it is difficult to change the vendor systems (vendor lock-in). In other words, custom interfaces add additional integration tax and inhibit wide adoption of cloud computing.