The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) recently announced the formation of an incubator dedicated to addressing the need for open management standards for cloud computing. The Open Cloud Standards Incubator will work to develop a set of informational specifications for cloud resource management. These specifications could lead to interoperability standards within twelve months.

The work of the Open Cloud Standards Incubator will focus on ways to facilitate operations between private clouds within enterprises and other private, public or hybrid clouds by improving the interoperability between platforms through open cloud resource management standards. The group also aims to develop specifications to enable cloud service portability and provide management consistency across cloud and enterprise platforms.

This is good news for companies that are considering the deployment of important applications in the cloud. A set of internationally recognized standards would ease the fear of vendor lock-in and reduce the cost of managing applications.

The authors of the February 2009 University of California Berkeley report Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing write “cloud computing has the potential to transform a large part of the IT industry.” They also caution that one of the top 10 obstacles to the growth of this model of computing is data lock-in – being unable to move your applications from one cloud host to another. A solution to this obstacle, according to the report, is standardized APIs. This happens to be one of the goals of the DMTF’s efforts.

Winston Bumpus, president of the DMTF and Director of Standards Architecture at VMWare, says IT standards are important in increasing choice, reducing costs and improving operability in the data center. Bumpus says the incubator is going to be building on the DMTF’s new Open Virtualization Format (OVF), a set of systems management standards for virtualized environments.

“The OVF is an important building block for cloud interoperability,” says Bumpus. “It’s a packaging format for deploying virtual machines. When you are dealing with Infrastructure-as-a-Service in a cloud space, it’s critically important to be able to package up virtual machines and applications and move them between data centers in a consistent platform-independent and secure way.”

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.