Intelligent CIO North America Issue 13 | Page 46

CIO OPINION
To move forward , companies should aim for a greater degree of IT orchestration , which in turn , can facilitate more seamless migrations within their multi-cloud environment . working together to develop open cloud standards , an endeavor that began with OpenStack , the joint project by NASA and Rackspace .
The National Institute of Standards and Technology ( NIST ) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ( IEEE ) are collaborating on the creation of an Intercloud , while other open standard initiatives are being led by the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation ( CNCF ) as well as the Cloud Security Alliance . can facilitate more seamless migrations within their multi-cloud environment . In addition to CO platforms , they can deploy tools such as containers to increase mobility of workloads between clouds . Because all of the dependencies of the software , from the code to supporting tools to runtime , reside within the container , the infrastructure platform it is running on becomes less important .
Journey to standardization
Broader efforts are underway to address cloud interoperability challenges . Industry bodies are
All of these efforts are in the early stages of development and will only gain wide acceptance if they are adopted by the major cloud providers . For their part , cloud providers are developing adapters , shared APIs and platform-agnostic containers to further facilitate interoperability .
Cloud computing is still a far cry from becoming a bona fide utility resource . Until its ambitions of true interoperability and data mobility are met , organizations need to carefully steer their IT strategies and purchase decisions toward solutions that deliver the flexibility , scalability and value promised by the cloud . p
46 INTELLIGENTCIO NORTH AMERICA www . intelligentcio . com