SNIA and the Cloud Standards Customer Council to collaborate to help ensure technical developments meet user needs

Sept. 10 — The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) have formed an alliance to help ensure that newly-developed standards, as well as evolving existing standards, will meet customer needs. The Cloud Standards Customer Council, an end-user advocacy group managed by the Object Management Group (OMG), and the SNIA will help technology and solution vendors whose products implement these end-user qualified standards know that there is a ready market for them, while customers will be able to choose from a range of solutions in order to meet performance, cost and efficiency goals.

"As we continue to develop the CDMI cloud standard, cloud best practices, and cloud education, closer collaboration and feedback with the CSCC will further align industry efforts for key requirements including interoperability, data protection, and security," said Wayne M. Adams, Chair of the SNIA. "CSCC focused efforts on user perspective case studies, service level agreements, and vertical industry needs can accelerate the acceptance and use of accredited cloud standards."

The SNIA and CSCC alliance will open the doors for the two organizations to increase their ability to collaborate across three primary areas:

• The CSCC will make relevant use-cases and requirements documents available to the SNIA so the Association can provide feedback as well as a level of actionable detail of these documents.
• The SNIA will brief the CSCC on its relevant standards that have been developed or are in development and also share relevant documents for early review by the CSCC.
• The CSCC may review published SNIA standards and produce statements of their relevance to CSCC published requirements.

"Cloud computing has the power to transform IT and many industries today, but needs end-user input to focus on real requirements," said Richard Mark Soley, Ph.D., chairman & CEO, OMG. "CSCC's membership is delighted that major standards organizations like SNIA are signing up to listen carefully to requirements and priorities from the burgeoning cloud user base."

The SNIA has a long history in developing cloud standards as well as training and industry education. The SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) Standard version 1.0.2 has recently been released and submitted to the JTC 1 for final ballot on internationalization as an industry standard. Additionally, the SNIA will have several training and educational opportunities available to the industry at the upcoming SNW Fall 2012 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. For more information, visit http://www.snwusa.com.

For more information on the Alliance, please visit http://cloud-council.org/sdol and http://www.snia.org/about/alliances. For more information about the SNIA's Cloud initiatives, visit, http://www.sniacloud.com and http://snia.org/forums/csi.

About the SNIA

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a not-for-profit global organization, made up of some 400 member companies spanning virtually the entire storage industry. SNIA's mission is to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting standards, technologies, and educational services to empower organizations in the management of information. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education, and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For additional information, visit the SNIA web site at http://www.snia.org.

About the Cloud Standards Customer Council

The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) is an OMG end user advocacy group dedicated to accelerating cloud's successful adoption, and drilling down into the standards, security and interoperability issues surrounding the transition to the cloud. The Council is not a standards organization, but will complement existing cloud standards efforts and establish a core set of client-driven requirements to ensure cloud users will have the same freedom of choice, flexibility, and openness they have with traditional IT environments. The Cloud Standards Customer Council is open to all end-user organizations. IBM, Kaavo, Rackspace and Software AG are Founding Sponsors. For more information on CSCC, visit http://www.cloud-council.org.

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Source: the Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC)