Kundra, Cerf to tackle cloud issues at NIST forum
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NIST will host the Cloud Computing Forum and Workshop III April 7-8 at its Gaithersburg, Md., campus.
Officials at the National Institute of Standards and Technology will give progress reports on the government’s Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap and other security and open-standard initiatives at a cloud forum and workshop next month.
NIST will host the Cloud Computing Forum and Workshop III April 7-8 at its Gaithersburg, Md., campus. Featured speakers include federal CIO Vivek Kundra, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf and NIST Director Patrick Gallagher.
NIST officials and members of working groups formed during NIST’s Cloud Computing Workshop and Forum in November 2010 will give progress reports on security and standards efforts at the upcoming event. NIST officials will also present agency business use cases, release a first version of a neutral cloud computing reference architecture and taxonomy, and give further details about the Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart the Adoption of Cloud Computing (SAJACC) process.
Panel sessions during the forum will feature international cloud computing experts from industry, government, associations and academia. On the second day of the forum, a panel in the morning — “Cloud Innovation: Math and Science” — will explore innovative uses of the cloud and how it can be used in the scientific process.
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Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
Kundra asked NIST to help accelerate the federal government’s adoption of secure cloud computing practices by leading efforts to develop standards and guidelines in collaboration with standards bodies, the private sector, other government agencies and other stakeholders.
To that end, in May 2010, NIST hosted the first Cloud Computing Forum and Workshop. The purpose of that workshop was to initiate engagement with industry to accelerate the development of interoperability, portability and security initiatives.
At that event, NIST officials announced SAJACC, a strategy, process and Web portal to facilitate collaborative development of standards to support cloud computing requirements. NIST officials also presented more details on the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, which seeks to streamline the duplicative and costly work of certifying that applications will run securely on agency networks.
The purpose of the second forum was to report on the status of the cloud computing efforts, begin developing the Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap for federal and industrial stakeholders, and advance a dialogue between those groups.
NIST officials also announced at that forum that researchers are working on a simulation model to understand and predict behavior in cloud computing systems.
For more information on the Cloud Computing Forum and Workshop III and to register, go to www.nist.gov/itl/cloud/cloudworkshopiii.cfm.
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