by the provider itself, which is often robust and protects the privacy of each customer when in the cloud storage environment, and the second is security provided by the customer. "This relates to how they have configured their storage implementation and applications that are running within the cloud provider," he explains. STANDARD TO ALLAY RISKS In order to remove the potential for lock-in, SNIA ANZ has developed the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI). According to Gold, the CDMI is the first industry-developed open standard for cloud computing being ratified. "CDMI is going through the process of being adopted as a global standard to enable data to be easily and securely moved to another provider if both have the standard interface," says Gold. The CDMI defines the functional interface that applications will use to create, retrieve, update and delete data elements from the cloud. The aim of this interface is to enable clients to discover the capabilities of the cloud storage offering. In addition, it will assist them to use the interface to manage containers and the data that is placed in them. Furthermore, metadata can be set on containers and their contained data elements through this interface. Management of containers, accounts, security access and monitoring/billing information, even for storage that is accessible by other protocols, will also be enabled by this interface. It is vital that the capabilities of the underlying storage and data services are known in order to understand what is being offered, and the CDMI facilitates this