Nimbus is actively moving its IT systems to various cloud options. It started its journey into clouds with an IBM CloudBurst® private cloud for its marketing applications. Having been successful in its pilot, Nimbus started to move some of its data-process- ing-intensive applications to Amazon Web Services (public cloud) in time for handling Christmas volumes. It moved a couple of custom-built applications to Amazon EC2 and the Marketing data mart to Amazon’s Oracle instance. The SaaS-based BI vendors, Birst or PivotLink, are being looked at for replacing its current marketing dashboard, having moved the data mart to the cloud. Nimbus is also considering using Force.com or Google App Engine (GAE) PaaS environments to build additional marketing applications. The standards are reviewed with this company in mind.

5.2  Deep Dive: Interoperability Standards

In using the new cloud setup for its applications, Nimbus faces the following interoperability challenges:

––The SaaS-based marketing dashboard on one vendor cloud has to fetch the data from the Marketing data mart sitting on Amazon’s infrastructure (IaaS)

––The marketing applications built on Force.com or GAE (PaaS) needs to interact with the other applications running on Amazon EC2

Similarly, there could be many such scenarios between public and private cloud deployments as well as across various delivery models such as SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. What are the expectations from standards to address these challenges?

5.2.1  Purpose, Expectations and Challenges

Interoperability is typically achieved through APIs or brokers between the two interacting parties where the control and the data originating from the requestor is converted into a common format and then moved to the provider and vice versa. The purpose of the standards is thus to set guidelines for vendors, cloud providers and developers of these APIs/brokers to enable interoperability across various cloud resources and hence avoid vendor lock-in.

There are, however, additional challenges posed for interoperability in the cloud scenario when compared with that of the traditional IT environments, such as:

•In addition to the interoperability of application control and data, other supporting aspects of policy management, security management and deployment/provisioning are also to be managed across all the interfacing environments.

•In the infrastructure layer, cloud computing is supported by the concept of virtualisation. Interoperability heavily depends on the compatibility of these virtual machines (VM).

How do some of the current standardisation initiatives fare?