Saturday, January 09, 2010

Call for standards and protocols for cloud computing

[computerworld] Vint Cerf, a co-designer of the Internet's TCP/IP protocols and considered a father of the Internet itself, emphasized the need for data portability standards for cloud computing during an appearance on Thursday evening.

There are different clouds from companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and Google, but a lack of interoperability between them, Cerf explained at a session of the Churchill Club business and technology organization in Menlo Park, Calif.

"At some point, it makes sense for somebody to say, 'I want to move my data from cloud A to cloud B,' " but the different clouds do not know each other, he said.

"We don't have any inter-cloud standards," Cerf said. The current cloud situation is similar to the lack of communication and familiarity among computer networks in 1973, said Cerf, who is vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google.

"People are going to want to move data around, they're going to want to ask clouds to do things for them," said Cerf. They might even want to have multiple clouds interact with each other in order to take advantage of the computing power offered through such combinations, he said.

"There's a whole raft of research work still to be done and protocols to be designed and standards to be adopted that will allow people to manage assets" in clouds, Cerf said. Google, for its part, is resonant with this notion, he said. But right now, users can get data out of the Google cloud but perhaps not send it to another cloud.

Cerf urges standards for cloud computing

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