Finally, cloud computing standards and interoperability being established

With the advent of cloud computing exploding to most any type of application being available, it only makes sense for industry standards and interoperability to be established. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) announced today the formation of the Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) in order to establish a lexicon of cloud-computing terminology, publish use cases, white papers and technical specifications, and to create reference implementation models for grid-storage architectures. The implications of this news, should it be embraced by vendors and more importantly end-users (organizations) should drive cloud computing to a whole other level. The creation of open standards for vendors to comply will also make it easier for customers to migrate from one system to another and allow the end-user multiple choices of vendors and applications as they should all work together as this is one the goals that this cloud initiative establishes. The creation and consumption of data should be easier by making the data easily portable to other applications within the enterprise space. This is especially great news for the SME market as there are many services that an SME can utilize such as cloud storage, outsourced procurement, server virtualization, human resources and all types enterprise software systems etc. That can be made to work together. This in-turn would make the IT strategies for organizations easier as now the data portion of the will be considered as this was not often the case. The explosion of information, different sources, the content management of internal and external data can now be managed a little easier. An advantage that this may offer organizations is that they can easily switch to other applications and not have to redo the implementation as the data is now reusable and portable. Lets hope the cloud computing initiative can provides direction, allows data transformation, portability and not lose sight of why this was created. Vendors that offer this thought leadership and early adoption of the cloud initiative might be looked upon as market leaders in a step towards creating a more trusting relationship with customers.