Special Publication 500-291, Version 2

NIST Cloud Computing

Standards Roadmap

NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap Working Group

NIST Cloud Computing Program

Information Technology Laboratory
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NIST Special Publication 500-291, 

Version 2

(Supersedes Version 1.0, July 2011)

NIST Cloud Computing 

Standards Roadmap 

NIST Cloud Computing Standards 

Roadmap Working Group

July 2013

U. S. Department of Commerce

Penny Pritzker, Secretary

National Institute of Standards and Technology

Patrick D. Gallagher, Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and Director 
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NIST CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS ROADMAP

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Reports on Computer Systems Technology

The Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at the National Institute of Standards and 

Technology (NIST) promotes the U.S. economy and public welfare by providing technical 

leadership for the nation’s measurement and standards infrastructure. ITL develops tests, test 

methods, reference data, proof of concept implementations, and technical analysis to advance the 

development and productive use of information technology. ITL’s responsibilities include the 

development of technical, physical, administrative, and management standards and guidelines for 

the cost-effective security and privacy of sensitive unclassified information in federal computer 

systems. This document reports on ITL’s research, guidance, and outreach efforts in Information 

Technology and its collaborative activities with industry, government, and academic organizations. 

National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 500-291 V2

Natl. Inst. Stand. Technol. Spec. Publ. 500-291, 108 pages (May 24, 2013)

DISCLAIMER

This document has been prepared by the National Institute of Standards and Technology 

(NIST) and describes standards research in support of the NIST Cloud Computing 

Program.

Certain commercial entities, equipment, or material may be identified in this document in 

order to describe a concept adequately. Such identification is not intended to imply 

recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, 

nor is it intended to imply that these entities, materials, or equipment are necessarily the 

best available for the purpose.
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Acknowledgements

This document is an update of the first version, which was published in July 2011. It reflects the 

contributions and discussions by the membership of the NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap 

Working Group, chaired by Michael Hogan and Annie Sokol of the Information Technology Laboratory, 

National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce. 

NIST SP 500-291, Version 2 has been collaboratively authored by the NIST Cloud Computing Standards 

Roadmap Working Group. As of the date of this publication, there are over one thousand Working Group 

participants from industry, academia, and government. Federal agency participants include NASA and the 

U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Health & Human Services, Homeland Security,

Justice, Transportation, Treasury, State, and Veterans Affairs.

NIST would like to acknowledge the specific contributions from the following Working Group members:

Alan Sill, Open Grid Forum Michaela Iorga, NIST

Annie Sokol, NIST Nancy Landreville, University of Maryland

Craig Lee, Open Grid Forum P W Carey, Compliance Partners, LLC

David Harper, Johns Hopkins University Paul Lipton, CA Technologies

Eugene Luster, U.S. Department of Defense Richard Brackney, Microsoft

Frederic de Vaulx, NIST Robert Bohn, NIST

Gary Massaferro, AlloyCloud, Inc. Robert Marcus, Cloud Standards Customer Council

Gilbert Pilz, Oracle Corporation Shin Adachi, NTT Multimedia Communications Labs

Jerry Smith, US Department of Defense Steven McGee, SAW Concepts LLC

John Calhoon, Microsoft Steven Woodward, Woodward Systems

John Messina, NIST Sundararajan Ramanathan, Capgemini US Consulting

Michael Hogan, NIST Winston Bumpus, DMTF, VMWare Inc.

Michael Stewart, Space and Naval Warfare 

Systems Command

The NIST editors for this document were: Michael Hogan and Annie Sokol.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY..................................................................................................................................... 1

2 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................... 5

2.1 BACKGROUND.................................................................................................................................................. 5

2.2 NIST CLOUD COMPUTING VISION............................................................................................................... 6

2.3 NIST CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS ROADMAP WORKING GROUP ............................................. 7

2.4 HOW THIS REPORT WAS PRODUCED.......................................................................................................... 7

3 THE NIST DEFINITION OF CLOUD COMPUTING ....................................................................................... 8

4 CLOUD COMPUTING REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE...............................................................................11

4.1 OVERVIEW .......................................................................................................................................................11

4.2 CLOUD CONSUMER........................................................................................................................................14

4.3 CLOUD PROVIDER..........................................................................................................................................16

4.3.1 SERVICE DEPLOYMENT.........................................................................................................................17

4.3.2 SERVICEORCHESTRATION....................................................................................................................18

4.3.3 CLOUD SERVICE MANAGEMENT .........................................................................................................19

4.3.4 SECURITY.................................................................................................................................................20

4.3.5 PRIVACY ...................................................................................................................................................21

4.4 CLOUD AUDITOR............................................................................................................................................23

4.5 CLOUD BROKER..............................................................................................................................................23

4.6 CLOUD CARRIER.............................................................................................................................................24

5 CLOUD COMPUTING USE CASES...................................................................................................................25

5.1 BUSINESS USE CASES....................................................................................................................................25

5.2 TECHNICAL USE CASES ................................................................................................................................26

5.3 DEPLOYMENT SCENARIO PERSPECTIVE..................................................................................................26

6 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS ................................................................................................................32

6.1 INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES (IT) STANDARDS LIFE CYCLE.............32

6.2 THE ROLE OF CONFORMITY ASSESSMENT TO STANDARDS...............................................................33

6.2.1 CONFORMITY ASSESSMENT ACTIVITIES ............................................................................................34

6.2.2 GOVERNMENT USE OF CONFORMITY ASSESSMENT SYSTEMS.......................................................35

6.2.3 VISUALIZATION OF CONFORMITY ASSESSMENT PROCESSES ........................................................36

6.2.4 CURRENT STATE OF CONFORMITY ASSESSMENT IN CLOUD COMPUTING .................................38

6.3 CATEGORIZING THE STATUS OF STANDARDS .......................................................................................39

6.4 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS FOR INTEROPERABILITY AND PORTABILITY .........................40

6.4.1 CLOUD STANDARDS FOR INTEROPERABILITY..........................................................................40

6.4.2 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS FOR PORTABILITY ...........................................................42

6.4.3 SUMMARY ON INTEROPERABILITY AND PORTABILITY ..........................................................43

6.5 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS FOR SECURITY ................................................................................44

6.6 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS FOR PERFORMANCE ......................................................................47

6.6.1 CLOUD STANDARDS FOR SERVICE AGREEMENTS ...........................................................................48

6.6.2 CLOUD STANDARDS FOR MONITORING.............................................................................................49

6.7 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS FOR ACCESSIBILITY ......................................................................49

7 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS MAPPING ............................................................................................51

7.1 SECURITY STANDARDS MAPPING .............................................................................................................52

7.2 INTEROPERABILITY STANDARDS MAPPING ...........................................................................................58

7.3 PORTABILITY STANDARDS MAPPING.......................................................................................................59
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7.4 PERFORMANCE STANDARDS MAPPING....................................................................................................60

7.5 ACCESSIBILITY STANDARDS MAPPING....................................................................................................61

8 ANALYZING USE CASES TO IDENTIFY STANDARDS GAPS ...................................................................62

8.1 USE CASE: CREATING, ACCESSING, UPDATING, DELETING DATA OBJECTS IN CLOUD 

SYSTEMS ....................................................................................................................................................................62

8.2 USE CASE: MOVING VMS, VIRTUAL APPLIANCES, SERVICES, AND APPLIANCES BETWEEN

CLOUDS ......................................................................................................................................................................63

8.3 USE CASE: SELECTING THE BEST IAAS CLOUD VENDOR, PUBLIC OR PRIVATE............................63

8.4 USE CASE: PORTABLE TOOLS FOR MONITORING AND MANAGING CLOUD SYSTEMS ................63

8.5 USE CASE: MOVING DATA BETWEEN CLOUD SYSTEMS......................................................................64

8.6 USE CASE: SINGLE SIGN-ON ACCESS TO MULTIPLE CLOUD SYSTEMS............................................65

8.7 USE CASE: ORCHESTRATED PROCESSES ACROSS CLOUD SYSTEMS AND ENTERPRISE 

SYSTEMS ....................................................................................................................................................................65

8.8 USE CASE: DISCOVERING CLOUD RESOURCES ......................................................................................66

8.9 USE CASE: EVALUATING SLAS AND PENALTIES....................................................................................67

8.10 USE CASE: AUDITING CLOUD SYSTEMS...................................................................................................67

8.11 END-TO-END: CLOUD RESOURCE MANAGEMENT USE CASE..............................................................68

9 USG PRIORITIES TO FILL CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS GAPS ..................................................69

9.1 AREAS OF STANDARDIZATION GAPS........................................................................................................69

9.1.1 SAAS FUNCTIONAL INTERFACES .........................................................................................................70

9.1.2 SAAS SELF-SERVICE MANAGEMENT INTERFACES............................................................................70

9.1.3 PAAS FUNCTIONAL INTERFACES.........................................................................................................70

9.1.4 BUSINESS SUPPORT, PROVISIONING AND CONFIGURATION.........................................................70

9.1.5 SECURITY.................................................................................................................................................71

9.1.6 ACCESSIBILITY........................................................................................................................................71

9.2 STANDARDIZATION PRIORITIES BASED ON USG CLOUD COMPUTING ADOPTION PRIORITIES72

9.2.1 SECURITY AUDITING AND COMPLIANCE...........................................................................................72

9.2.2 IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT ..............................................................................................73

9.2.3 SAAS APPLICATION SPECIFIC DATA AND METADATA.....................................................................73

9.2.4 RESOURCE DESCRIPTION AND DISCOVERY......................................................................................73

9.2.5 SUMMARY OF STANDARDIZATION GAPS AND STANDARDIZATION PRIORITIES .........................74

10 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS................................................................................................76

10.1 CONCLUSIONS.................................................................................................................................................76

10.2 RECOMMEDATION TO USG AGENCIES TO HELP ACCELERATE THE DEVELOPMENT AND USE 

OF CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS .......................................................................................................76

11 BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................................................................................................................................78

12 APPENDIX A – NIST FEDERAL INFORMATION PROCESSING STANDARDS AND SPECIAL 

PUBLICATIONS RELEVANT TO CLOUD COMPUTING ............................................................................80

13 APPENDIX B – DEFINITIONS............................................................................................................................81

14 APPENDIX C – ACRONYMS ..............................................................................................................................86

15 APPENDIX D – STANDARDS DEVELOPING ORGANIZATIONS ..............................................................89

16 APPENDIX E – CONCEPTUAL MODELS AND ARCHITECTURES...........................................................97

17 APPENDIX F – EXAMPLES OF USG CRITERIA FOR SELECTION OF STANDARDS ..........................98
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LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1 – CLOUD ACTORS ................................................................................................................12

FIGURE 2 – INTERACTIONS BETWEEN THE ACTORS IN CLOUD COMPUTING .........................................13

FIGURE 3 – EXAMPLE OF SERVICES AVAILABLE TO A CLOUD CONSUMER ..........................................15

FIGURE 4 – CLOUD PROVIDER: MAJOR ACTIVITIES .............................................................................16

FIGURE 5 – CLOUD PROVIDER: SERVICE ORCHESTRATION..................................................................18

FIGURE 6 – CLOUD PROVIDER: CLOUD SERVICE MANAGEMENT.........................................................20

FIGURE 7 – HIGH-LEVEL GENERIC SCENARIOS ...................................................................................27

FIGURE 8 – IT STANDARDS LIFE CYCLE..............................................................................................33

FIGURE 9 – CONFORMITY ASSESSMENT INFRASTRUCTURE .................................................................36

FIGURE 10 – ACCREDITATION PROCESS ..............................................................................................37

FIGURE 11 – ASSESSMENT PROCESS....................................................................................................38

FIGURE 12 – THE COMBINED CONCEPTUAL REFERENCE DIAGRAM ....................................................51

FIGURE 13 – DOD DISR STANDARDS SELECTION PROCESS..............................................................102
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LIST OF TABLES

TABLE 1 – CLOUD CONSUMER AND CLOUD PROVIDER .......................................................................14

TABLE 2 – DEPLOYMENT CASES FOR HIGH LEVEL SCENARIOS ...........................................................28

TABLE 3 – SCENARIOS AND TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS ....................................................................31

TABLE 4 – STANDARDS MATURITY MODEL ........................................................................................39

TABLE 5 – SECURITY STANDARDS: AUTHENTICATION AND AUTHORIZATION .....................................52

TABLE 6 – SECURITY STANDARDS: CONFIDENTIALITY........................................................................53

TABLE 7 – SECURITY STANDARDS: INTEGRITY....................................................................................53

TABLE 8 – SECURITY STANDARDS: IDENTITY MANAGEMENT .............................................................54

TABLE 9 – SECURITY STANDARDS: SECURITY MONITORING & INCIDENT RESPONSE..........................55

TABLE 10 – SECURITY STANDARDS: SECURITY CONTROLS.................................................................56

TABLE 11 – SECURITY STANDARDS: SECURITY POLICY MANAGEMENT..............................................57

TABLE 12 – SECURITY STANDARDS: AVAILABILITY............................................................................57

TABLE 13 – INTEROPERABILITY STANDARDS ......................................................................................58

TABLE 14 – PORTABILITY STANDARDS ...............................................................................................59

TABLE 15 – PERFORMANCE STANDARDS.............................................................................................60

TABLE 16 – ACCESSIBILITY STANDARDS.............................................................................................61

TABLE 17 – AREAS OF STANDARDIZATION GAPS AND STANDARDIZATION PRIORITIES.......................75

TABLE 18 – DOD SELECTION CRITERIA AND DESCRIPTION SUMMARY .............................................100

TABLE 19 – DOD STANDARDS SOURCES PREFERENCES ....................................................................101
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Foreword

This is the second edition of the NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap, which has been 

developed by the members of the public NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap Working 

Group. This edition includes updates to the information on portability, interoperability, and security 

standards in the first edition and adds new information on accessibility and performance standards. 

Also new in this edition is information on the role of conformity assessment in support of voluntary 

consensus standards. Analyzing typical government use cases (see Section 8), U.S. Government 

priorities and gaps in cloud computing voluntary consensus standards are identified in this edition 

and the previous edition. This information is intended for use by federal agencies and other 

stakeholders to help plan their participation in voluntary consensus standards development and 

related conformity assessment activities, which can help to accelerate the agencies’ secure adoption 

of cloud computing.
1

1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been designated by the Federal 

Chief Information Officer (CIO) to accelerate the federal government’s secure adoption of cloud 

computing by leading efforts to identify existing standards and guidelines. Where standards are 

needed, NIST works closely with U.S. industry, standards developers, other government agencies, 

and leaders in the global standards community to develop standards that will support secure cloud 

computing.

Consistent with NIST’s mission,

1 the NIST Cloud Computing Program has developed a USG Cloud 

Computing Technology Roadmap, as one of many mechanisms in support of United States 

Government (USG) secure and effective adoption of the Cloud Computing model2 to reduce costs 

and improve services. Standards are critical to ensure cost-effective and easy migration, to ensure 

that mission-critical requirements can be met, and to reduce the risk that sizable investments may 

become prematurely technologically obsolete. Standards are key elements required to ensure a level 

playing field in the global marketplace,

3 The importance of setting standards in close relation with 

private sector involvement is highlighted in a memorandum from the White House: M-12-08,

4 dated 

January 17, 2012.

The NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap Working Group has surveyed the existing 

standards landscape for interoperability, performance, portability, security, and accessibility

standards/models/studies/use cases/conformity assessment programs, etc., relevant to cloud 

computing. Where possible, new and emerging standardization work has also been tracked and 

surveyed. Using this available information, current standards, standards gaps, and standardization

priorities are identified within this document.

 

1 This effort is consistent with the NIST role per the National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act (NTTAA) of 

1995, which became law in March 1996. 

2 NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, Special Publication 800-145, “Cloud computing is a model for enabling 

ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., 

networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal 

management effort or service provider interaction.”

3 This edition of the standards roadmap focuses on USG cloud computing requirements for interoperability, 

performance, portability, security, and accessibility, and does not preclude the needs to address other essential 

requirements.

4 Principles for Federal Engagement in Standards Activities to Address National Priorities, January 17, 2012

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/2012/m-12-08.pdf
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The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing identified cloud computing as a model for enabling 

ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing 

resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly 

provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

As an extension to the above NIST cloud computing definition, a NIST cloud computing reference 

architecture has been developed by the NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture and 

Taxonomy Working Group that depicts a generic high-level conceptual model for discussing the 

requirements, structures and operations of cloud computing. It contains a set of views and 

descriptions that are the basis for discussing the characteristics, uses, and standards for cloud 

computing, and relates to a companion cloud computing taxonomy.5

Cloud computing use cases describe the consumer requirements when using cloud computing 

service offerings. Through its working groups as described below, the NIST Cloud Computing 

program has studied a range of U.S. federal government and general-purpose use cases to extract 

features that are amenable to standardization. Using these examples, the current document analyzes 

how existing cloud-related standards fit the needs of federal cloud consumers and identifies 

standardization gaps.

Cloud computing standards are already available in support of many of the functions and 

requirements. While many of these standards were developed in support of pre-cloud computing 

technologies, such as those designed for web services and the Internet, they also support the 

functions and requirements of cloud computing. Other standards have been developed or are now 

being developed to support specific cloud computing functions and requirements, such as 

virtualization, infrastructure management, service level agreements (SLAs), audits and cloudspecific data handling. Wherever possible, applicable standards are identified in this document.

To assess the state of standardization in support of cloud computing, the NIST Cloud Computing 

Standards Roadmap Working Group has compiled an Inventory of Standards Relevant to Cloud 

Computing.

6 This inventory is being maintained and updated as necessary. Using the taxonomy 

developed by the NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture and Taxonomy Working Group, 

cloud computing relevant standards have been mapped to the requirements of accessibility, 

interoperability, performance, portability, and security.

 

5 NIST Special Publication 500-292, NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture, September 2011

http://www.nist.gov/customcf/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=909505

6 http://collaborate.nist.gov/twiki-cloud-computing/bin/view/CloudComputing/StandardsInventory
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Present areas with standardization gaps include: SaaS (Software as a Service) functional interfaces; 

SaaS self-service management interfaces; PaaS (Platform as a Service) functional interfaces; 

business support / provisioning / configuration; security; and privacy. Present standardization areas 

of priority to the federal government include: security auditing and compliance; identity and access 

management; SaaS application specific data and metadata; and resource description and discovery. 

While there are only a few approved cloud computing specific standards at present, there is a fastchanging landscape of cloud computing-relevant standardization under way in a number of 

Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs). Every effort has been made in the context of the 

NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap to engage with and to gather input from SDOs active 

in this area. Federal agencies should also be encouraged to participate specifically in cloud 

computing standards development projects that support the specific needs and priorities of their 

cloud computing services. Specific recommendations regarding engagement between federal 

agencies and SDOs are:

Recommendation 1 – Contribute Agency Requirements

Agencies should coordinate and contribute clear and comprehensive user requirements for cloud 

computing standards projects.

Recommendation 2 – Participate in Standards Development 

Agencies should actively participate and coordinate in cloud computing standards development 

projects that are of high priority to their agency missions. The January 17, 2012, White House 

Memorandum, M-12-08,7 lists five fundamental strategic objectives for federal government 

agencies whenever engaging in standards development.

Recommendation 3 – Encourage Testing to Accelerate Technically Sound Standards-Based 

Deployments

Agencies should support the concurrent development of conformity and interoperability assessment 

schemes to accelerate the development and use of technically sound cloud computing standards and 

standards-based products, processes, and services. Agencies should also include consideration of 

conformity assessment approaches currently in place that take account of elements from 

international systems, to minimize duplicative testing and encourage private sector support.

 

7 Principles for Federal Engagement in Standards Activities to Address National Priorities, January 17, 2012
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Recommendation 4 – Specify Cloud Computing Standards

Agencies should specify cloud computing standards in their procurements and grant guidance when 

multiple vendors offer standards-based implementations and there is evidence of successful 

interoperability testing. 

Recommendation 5 – USG-Wide Use of Cloud Computing Standards

To support USG requirements for accessibility, interoperability, performance, portability, and 

security in cloud computing, the Federal Cloud Computing Standards and Technology Working 

Group, in coordination with the Federal CIO Council Cloud Computing Executive Steering 

Committee (CCESC) and the Cloud First Task Force, should recommend specific cloud computing 

standards and best practices for USG-wide use.
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2 INTRODUCTION

2.1 BACKGROUND

U.S. laws and associated policy require federal agencies to use international, voluntary consensus 

standards in their procurement and regulatory activities, except where inconsistent with law or 

otherwise impractical. 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been designated by the Federal 

Chief Information Officer (CIO) to accelerate the federal government’s secure adoption of cloud 

computing by leading efforts to identify existing standards and guidelines. Where standards are 

needed, NIST works closely with U.S. industry, standards developers, other government agencies, 

and leaders in the global standards community to develop standards that will support secure cloud 

computing.

The NIST Cloud Computing Program was formally launched in November 2010 and was created to

support the federal government effort to incorporate cloud computing as a replacement for, or 

enhancement to, traditional information system and application models where appropriate.

The NIST Cloud Computing Program operates in coordination with other federal cloud computing 

implementation efforts (CIO Council/Information Security and Identity Management Committee 

[ISIMC], etc.) and is integrated with the Federal CIO’s 25-point IT Implementation Plan for the 

federal government. 

At the beginning of 2011, NIST created the following public working groups in order to provide a 

technically oriented strategy and standards-based guidance for the federal cloud computing 

implementation effort:

• Cloud Computing Reference Architecture and Taxonomy Working Group

• Cloud Computing Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart Adoption of Cloud Computing 

(SAJACC) Working Group

• Cloud Computing Security Working Group

• Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap Working Group

• Cloud Computing Target Business Use Cases Working Group
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2.2 NIST CLOUD COMPUTING VISION

NIST seeks to provide leadership and guidance around the cloud computing paradigm to catalyze its 

use within industry and government. NIST also strives to shorten the adoption life cycle, which will 

enable near-term cost savings and increased ability to quickly create and deploy safe and secure 

enterprise solutions. Furthermore, NIST is committed to foster cloud computing practices that 

support interoperability, portability, and security requirements that are appropriate and achievable

for various usage scenarios, by focusing on the necessary standards, specifications, and guidance 

that must be in place for these requirements to be met.

8

The NIST area of focus is technology, and specifically, interoperability, portability, and security 

requirements, standards, and guidance. In this version of the document, accessibility and 

performance have also been included. The intent is to use the standards strategy to prioritize NIST 

tactical projects which support USG agencies in the secure and effective adoption of the cloud 

computing model to support their missions. The expectation is that these priorities will benefit 

industry, SDOs, cloud adopters, and policy makers. 

In this document, privacy as a standards issue is narrowly dealt with under confidentiality, a subset 

of information security. Confidentiality includes preserving authorized restrictions on access and 

disclosure, including means for protecting personal privacy. Because privacy requirements are 

mostly policy decisions, they are often developed by governments as laws and not by SDOs. 

Appendix J of NIST Special Publication 800-53, Revision 4, Security and Privacy Controls for 

Federal Information Systems and Organizations, includes a catalog of privacy controls for federal 

information systems and organizations and a process for selecting controls to protect organizational 

operations, organizational assets, individuals, other organizations, etc., from a diverse set of threats 

including hostile cyber-attacks, natural disasters, structural failures, and human errors (both 

intentional and unintentional).

 

8 SP 500-293 Volume II, US Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap Volume II (Draft) Release 1.0 

http://www.nist.gov/itl/cloud/upload/SP_500_293_volumeII.pdf
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2.3 NIST CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS ROADMAP WORKING GROUP

SDOs and others have and are developing supporting cloud computing documents to include 

standards, conceptual models, reference architectures, conformity assessment programs, and 

standards roadmaps to facilitate communication, data exchange, and security for cloud computing 

and its application. Still other standards are emerging to focus on technologies that support cloud 

computing, such as virtualization. The NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap Working Group 

is leveraging this existing, publicly available work, plus the work of the other NIST working 

groups, to develop a NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap that can be incorporated into the 

NIST USG Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap.

2.4 HOW THIS REPORT WAS PRODUCED

The NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap Working Group (CCSRWG) has surveyed the 

existing standards landscape for interoperability, performance, portability, security, and 

accessibility standards / models / studies / use cases / conformity assessment programs, etc., 

relevant to cloud computing. Using this available information, standards, standards gaps or 

overlaps, and standardization priorities have been identified, thereby providing a clearer picture of 

this evolving technical landscape.
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3 THE NIST DEFINITION OF CLOUD COMPUTING9

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a 

shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and 

services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service 

provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service 

models, and four deployment models.

Essential Characteristics: 

On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as 

server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human 

interaction with each service provider. 

Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through 

standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms 

(e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations). 

Resource pooling. The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers 

using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically 

assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location 

independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact 

location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of 

abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacenter). Examples of resources include storage, 

processing, memory, and network bandwidth. 

Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases 

automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the 

consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and 

can be appropriated in any quantity at any time. 

Measured service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging 

a metering capability10 at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service 

(e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, active user accounts). Resource usage can be 

monitored, controlled, audited, and reported, providing transparency for both the 

provider and consumer of the utilized service. 

 

9 NIST Special Publication 800-145, NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, September 2011

10 Typically this is done on a pay-per-use or charge-per-use basis. 
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Service Models: 

Software as a Service (SaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider’s 

applications running on a cloud infrastructure.

11 The applications are accessible from

various client devices through either a thin client interface, such as a web browser (e.g., 

web-based email) or a program interface. The consumer does not manage or control the 

underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, 

or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited userspecific application configuration settings. 

Platform as a Service (PaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the 

cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using 

programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider.

12 The 

consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including 

network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed 

applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment. 

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to provision 

processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the 

consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating 

systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying 

cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed 

applications, and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host 

firewalls).

Deployment Models:

Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization 

comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units). It may be owned, managed, and 

operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may 

exist on or off premises. 

 

11 A cloud infrastructure is the collection of hardware and software that enables the five essential characteristics of cloud 

computing. The cloud infrastructure can be viewed as containing both a physical layer and an abstraction layer. The 

physical layer consists of the hardware resources that are necessary to support the cloud services being provided, and 

typically includes server, storage and network components. The abstraction layer consists of the software deployed 

across the physical layer, which manifests the essential cloud characteristics. Conceptually the abstraction layer sits 

above the physical layer.

12 This capability does not necessarily preclude the use of compatible programming languages, libraries, services, and 

tools from other sources.
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Community cloud. The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a specific 

community of consumers from organizations that have shared concerns (e.g., mission, 

security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be owned, 

managed, and operated by one or more of the organizations in the community, a third 

party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises. 

Public cloud. The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for open use by the general public. It may 

be owned, managed, and operated by a business, academic, or government organization, 

or some combination of them. It exists on the premises of the cloud provider. 

Hybrid cloud. The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more distinct cloud 

infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound 

together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application 

portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds). 
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4 CLOUD COMPUTING REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE 13

The NIST cloud computing definition is widely accepted and valuable in providing a clear 

understanding of cloud computing technologies and cloud services. The NIST cloud computing 

reference architecture presented in this section is a natural extension to the NIST cloud computing 

definition.

The NIST cloud computing reference architecture is a generic high-level conceptual model that is a 

powerful tool for discussing the requirements, structures, and operations of cloud computing. The 

model is not tied to any specific vendor products, services, or reference implementation, nor does it 

define prescriptive solutions that inhibit innovation. It defines a set of actors, activities, and 

functions that can be used in the process of developing cloud computing architectures, and relates to 

a companion cloud computing taxonomy. It contains a set of views and descriptions that are the 

basis for discussing the characteristics, uses, and standards for cloud computing.

The NIST cloud computing reference architecture focuses on the requirements of what cloud 

service provides, not on a design that defines a solution and its implementation. It is intended to 

facilitate the understanding of the operational intricacies in cloud computing. The reference 

architecture does not represent the system architecture of a specific cloud computing system; 

instead, it is a tool for describing, discussing, and developing the system-specific architecture using 

a common framework of reference.

The design of the NIST cloud computing reference architecture serves the objectives to: illustrate 

and understand various cloud services in the context of an overall cloud computing conceptual 

model; provide technical references to USG agencies and other consumers to understand, discuss, 

categorize, and compare cloud services; and communicate and analyze security, interoperability, 

and portability candidate standards and reference implementations.

4.1 OVERVIEW

The Overview of the Reference Architecture describes five major actors with their roles and 

responsibilities using the newly developing Cloud Computing Taxonomy. The NIST cloud 

computing reference architecture defines five major actors: cloud consumer, cloud provider, cloud 

auditor, cloud broker, and cloud carrier (See Figure 1: Cloud Actors). These core individuals have 

key roles in the realm of cloud computing. Each actor is an entity (a person or an organization) that 

participates in a transaction or process and/or performs tasks in cloud computing. For example, a 

Cloud Consumer is an individual or organization that acquires and uses cloud products and services. 

The purveyor of products and services is the Cloud Provider. Because of the possible service 

 

13 NIST Special Publication 500-292, NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture, September 2011
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offerings (Software, Platform or Infrastructure) allowed for by the cloud provider, there will be a 

shift in the level of responsibilities for some aspects of the scope of control, security and 

configuration. The Cloud Broker acts as the intermediary between consumer and provider and will 

help consumers through the complexity of cloud service offerings and may also create value-added 

cloud services. The Cloud Auditor provides a valuable inherent function for the government by 

conducting the independent performance and security monitoring of cloud services. The Cloud

Carrier is the organization which has the responsibility of transferring the data, somewhat akin to 

the power distributor for the electric grid. 

Figure 1 – Cloud Actors briefly lists the five major actors defined in the NIST cloud computing 

reference architecture.

Figure 1 – Cloud Actors
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Figure 2 – Interactions between the Actors in Cloud Computing shows the interactions among the 

actors in the NIST cloud computing reference architecture. A cloud consumer may request cloud 

services from a cloud provider directly or via a cloud broker. A cloud auditor conducts independent 

audits and may contact the others to collect necessary information. The details will be discussed in 

the following sections and be presented as successive diagrams in increasing levels of detail.

Figure 2 – Interactions between the Actors in Cloud Computing
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4.2 CLOUD CONSUMER

The cloud consumer is the ultimate stakeholder that the cloud computing service is created to 

support. A cloud consumer represents a person or organization that maintains a business 

relationship with, and uses the service from, a cloud provider. A cloud consumer browses the 

service catalog from a cloud provider, requests the appropriate service, sets up service contracts 

with the cloud provider, and uses the service. The cloud consumer may be billed for the service 

provisioned, and needs to arrange payments accordingly. Depending on the services requested, the 

activities and usage scenarios can be different among cloud consumers, as shown in Table 1. Some 

example usage scenarios are listed in Figure 3.

Service

Models

Consumer Activities Provider Activities

SaaS Uses application/service for 

business process operations.

Installs, manages, maintains, and supports 

the software application on a cloud 

infrastructure.

PaaS Develops, tests, deploys, and 

manages applications hosted in a 

cloud system.

Provisions and manages cloud 

infrastructure and middleware for the 

platform consumers; provides 

development, deployment, and 

administration tools to platform consumers.

IaaS Creates/installs, manages, and 

monitors services for IT 

infrastructure operations.

Provisions and manages the physical 

processing, storage, networking, and the 

hosting environment and cloud 

infrastructure for IaaS consumers.

Table 1 – Cloud Consumer and Cloud Provider
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Figure 3 – Example of Services Available to a Cloud Consumer

SaaS applications are usually deployed as hosted services and are accessed via a network 

connecting SaaS consumers and providers. The SaaS consumers can be organizations that provide 

their members with access to software applications, end users who directly use software 

applications, or software application administrators who configure applications for end users. SaaS 

consumers access and use applications on demand, and can be billed on the number of consumers or 

the amount of consumed services. The latter can be measured in terms of the time in use, the 

network bandwidth consumed, or the amount/duration of data stored.
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For PaaS, cloud consumers employ the tools and execution resources provided by cloud providers 

for the purpose of developing, testing, deploying, and managing applications hosted in a cloud 

system. PaaS consumers can be application developers who design and implement application 

software, application testers who run and test applications in various cloud systems, application 

deployers who publish applications into a cloud system, and application administrators who 

configure and monitor application performance on a platform. PaaS consumers can be billed by the 

number of consumers, the type of resources consumed by the platform, or the duration of platform 

usage. 

For IaaS, consumers are provisioned with the capabilities to access virtual computers, networkaccessible storage, network infrastructure components, and other fundamental computing resources, 

on which consumers can deploy and run arbitrary software. IaaS consumers can be system 

developers, system administrators, and information technology (IT) managers who are interested in 

creating, installing, managing and monitoring services for IT infrastructure operations. IaaS 

consumers are provisioned with the capabilities to access these computing resources, and are billed 

for the amount of resources consumed.

4.3 CLOUD PROVIDER

Figure 4 – Cloud Provider: Major Activities
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A cloud provider can be a person, an organization, or an entity responsible for making a service 

available to cloud consumers. A cloud provider builds the requested software/platform/ 

infrastructure services, manages the technical infrastructure required for providing the services, 

provisions the services at agreed-upon service levels, and protects the security and privacy of the

services. As illustrated in Figure 4 – Cloud Provider: Major Activities, cloud providers undertake 

different tasks for the provisioning of the various service models.

For SaaS, the cloud provider deploys, configures, maintains, and updates the operation of the 

software applications on a cloud infrastructure so that the services are provisioned at the expected 

service levels to cloud consumers. The provider of SaaS assumes most of the responsibilities in 

managing and controlling the applications and the infrastructure, while the cloud consumers have 

limited administrative control of the applications. 

For PaaS, the cloud provider manages the cloud infrastructure for the platform, and provisions tools 

and execution resources for the platform consumers to develop, test, deploy, and administer 

applications. Consumers have control over the applications and possibly the hosting environment 

settings, but cannot access the infrastructure underlying the platform including network, servers, 

operating systems, or storage. 

For IaaS, the cloud provider provisions the physical processing, storage, networking, and other 

fundamental computing resources, as well as manages the hosting environment and cloud 

infrastructure for IaaS consumers. Cloud consumers deploy and run applications, have more control 

over the hosting environment and operating systems, but do not manage or control the underlying 

cloud infrastructure (e.g., the physical servers, network, storage, hypervisors, etc.). 

The activities of cloud providers can be discussed in greater detail from the perspectives of Service 

Deployment, Service Orchestration, Cloud Service Management, Security and Privacy.

4.3.1 SERVICE DEPLOYMENT

As identified in the NIST cloud computing definition, a cloud infrastructure may be operated in one 

of the following deployment models: public cloud, private cloud, community cloud, or hybrid cloud.

For the details related to the controls and management in the cloud, we refer readers to the NIST 

Special Publication 800-146, NIST Cloud Computing Synopsis and Recommendations.

A public cloud is one in which the cloud infrastructure and computing resources are made available 

to the general public over a public network. A public cloud is owned by an organization selling 

cloud services and serves a diverse pool of clients.

For private clouds, the cloud infrastructure is operated exclusively for a single organization. A 

private cloud gives the organization exclusive access to and usage of the infrastructure and 

computational resources. It may be managed either by the organization or by a third party, and may 
NIST CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS ROADMAP

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be implemented at the organization’s premise (i.e., on-site private clouds) or outsourced to a hosting 

company (i.e., outsourced private clouds).

Similar to private clouds, a community cloud may be managed by the organizations or by a third 

party, and may be implemented at the customer’s location (i.e., on-site community cloud) or 

outsourced to a hosting company (i.e., outsourced community cloud). However, a community cloud 

serves a set of organizations that have common security, privacy, and compliance considerations, 

rather than serving a single organization as does a private cloud.

A hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more cloud deployment models (private, community, or 

public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology 

that enables data and application portability. As discussed in this section, both private clouds and 

community clouds can be either implemented on-site or outsourced to a third party. Therefore, each 

constituent cloud of a hybrid cloud can be one of the five variants.

4.3.2 SERVICE ORCHESTRATION

Service orchestration refers to the arrangement, coordination, and management of cloud 

infrastructure to provide the optimizing capabilities of cloud services, as a cost-effective way of 

managing IT resources, as dictated by strategic business requirements. Figure 5 shows the general 

requirements and processes for cloud providers to build each of the three service models.

Figure 5 – Cloud Provider: Service Orchestration
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A three-layered framework is identified for a generalized cloud system in Figure 5. The top layer is 

the service layer, where a cloud provider defines and provisions each of the three service models. 

This is where cloud consumers consume cloud services through the respective cloud interfaces.

The middle layer is the resource abstraction and control layer. This layer contains the system 

components that a cloud provider uses to provide and manage access to the physical computing 

resources through software abstraction. The layer typically includes software elements such as 

hypervisors, virtual machines, virtual data storage, and other resource abstraction and management 

components needed to ensure efficient, secure, and reliable usage. While virtual machine 

technology is commonly used at this layer, other means of providing the necessary software 

abstractions are not precluded. This layer provides “cloud readiness” with the five characteristics 

defined in the NIST definition of cloud computing. 

The lowest layer in the framework is the physical resource layer, which includes all the physical 

computing resources. This layer includes hardware resources, such as computers (CPU and 

memory), networks (routers, firewalls, switches, network links, and interfaces), storage components 

(hard disks), and other physical computing infrastructure elements. It also includes facilities 

resources, such as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), power, communications, and 

other aspects of the physical plant.

Note that in this framework, the horizontal positioning of layers implies a stack in which the upper 

layer has a dependency on the lower layer. The resource abstraction and control layer build virtual 

cloud resources on top of the underlying physical resource layer and support the service layer where 

cloud services interfaces are exposed. The three service models can be built either on top of one 

another (i.e., SaaS built upon PaaS and PaaS built upon IaaS) or directly upon the underlying cloud 

infrastructure. For example, a SaaS application can be implemented and hosted on virtual machines 

from IaaS or directly on top of cloud resources without using IaaS.

4.3.3 CLOUD SERVICE MANAGEMENT

Cloud Service Management includes all of the service-related functions that are necessary for the 

management and operation of those services required by or proposed to cloud consumers. As 

illustrated in Figure 6, cloud service management can be described from the perspective of business 

support, provisioning and configuration, and from the perspective of portability and 

interoperability requirements.
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Figure 6 – Cloud Provider: Cloud Service Management

4.3.4 SECURITY

“As the Federal Government moves to the cloud, it must be vigilant to ensure the security and 

proper management of government information to protect the privacy of citizens and national 

security” (by Vivek Kundra, Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, February 2011.) In July 2012, the 

U.S. Department of Defense released a Cloud Computing Strategy, which stated “the Department 

has specific cloud computing challenges that require careful adoption considerations, especially in 

areas of cybersecurity, continuity of operations, information assurance (IA), and resilience.” Also, 

in November 2012, NIST published a White Paper – Challenging Security Requirements for U.S.

Government Cloud Computing Adoption. This document provides an overview of the high-priority 

security challenges perceived by federal agencies as impediments to the adoption of cloud 

computing.

Cloud 

Consumers

Cloud Service 

Management

Business 

Support

Customer Mgmt

Contract Mgmt

Inventory Mgmt

Accounting

& Billing

Reporting &

Auditing

Pricing & 

Rating

Rapid Provisioning

Provisioning /

Configuration

Resource Change

Monitoring &

Reporting

Metering

SLA Management

Data Portability

Portability /

Interoperability

Service 

Interoperability

System

Portability

Copy Date To-From

Bulk Data

Application /

SVC Migration

Unified Management 

Interface Cloud 

Brokers

VM Images

Migration
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Security is a cross-cutting function that spans all layers of the reference architecture (see Figure 12

– The Combined Conceptual Reference Diagram), involving end-to-end security that ranges from 

physical security to application security, and in general, the responsibility is shared between cloud 

provider and federal cloud consumer. For example, the protection of the physical resource layer (see 

Figure 5 – Cloud Provider: Service Orchestration) requires physical security that denies 

unauthorized access to the building, facility, resource, or stored information. Cloud Providers 

should ensure that the facility hosting cloud services is secure and that the staff has proper 

background checks. When data or applications are moved to a cloud, Cloud Consumers ensure that 

the cloud offering satisfies the security requirements and enforces the compliance rules. Several 

U.S. government agencies provide computer security guidance, and that the cloud system should 

support the most up-to-date guidance. It is also important to note that security, compliance, and 

policy requirements are a function of the legal jurisdiction of the country in which the cloud 

services are provided and can vary from country to country. An independent audit (see Section 3.4) 

should be conducted to verify the compliance with regulations or security policies.

4.3.5 PRIVACY

Cloud providers should protect the assured, proper, and consistent collection, processing, 

communication, use, and disposition of personal information (PI) and personally identifiable 

information (PII) in the cloud system. PII is the information that can be used to distinguish or trace 

an individual’s identity, such as name, social security number, biometric records, etc., alone, or 

when combined with other personal or identifying information that is linked or linkable to a specific 

individual, such as date and place of birth, mother’s maiden name, etc. The CIO Council – Privacy 

Committee14 has identified privacy and protection of collected PII as one of the federal government 

key business imperatives. Though cloud computing provides a flexible solution for shared 

resources, software, and information, it also poses additional privacy challenges to consumers using 

the clouds.

The Digital Government Strategy15 issued by the Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) on May 

23, 2012 sets forth a new vision of how government is to connect with and provide services to the 

American people, harnessing the power of digital technology and enabling citizens and the federal 

workforce to securely access government digital information, data, and services anywhere, and 

 

14 https://cio.gov/about/committees/privacy-committee/

15 Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People (May 23, 2012), 

(Strategy) http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digital-government/digital-government.html
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anytime (Recommendations).

16 The Federal CIO Council released Recommendations for 

Standardized Implementation of Digital Privacy Controls (Recommendations), which discusses 

three fundamental privacy controls: PII Inventory, Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), and Privacy 

Notice. The Recommendations are that agencies identify and consider all PII that may be collected 

or otherwise exposed through a particular digital technology, analyze the privacy risks through the 

data life cycle by conducting and updating a PIA (as needed), and provide notice to individuals of 

when and how their PII will be collected, used, retained, and disclosed.

Furthermore, federal agencies should be aware of the privacy concerns associated with the cloud 

computing environment where data are stored on a server that is not owned or controlled by the 

federal government. Privacy impact assessment (PIA) can be conducted, as needed, to measure how 

well the cloud system conforms to applicable legal, regulatory, and policy requirements regarding 

privacy. A PIA can help federal agencies comply with applicable privacy laws and regulations 

governing an individual’s privacy, and to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of an 

individual’s personal information at every stage of development and operation.

In furthering the milestone action goal of the Digital Government Strategy for addressing digital 

privacy, records retention, and security issues, the National Archives & Records Administration 

(NARA) has issued Electronic Records Management (ERM) guidance for digital content created, 

collected, or maintained by federal agencies17. NARA also serves as managing partner of the EGovernment ERM Initiative, coordinating the development and issuance of enterprise-wide ERM 

tools and electronic information standards, to support the interoperability of federal agency record 

systems and improve customer service (e.g., digital records access).18

 

16 Recommendations for Standardized Implementation of Digital Privacy Controls (December 2012), https://cio.gov/wpcontent/uploads/downloads/2012/12/Standardized_Digital_Privacy_Controls.pdf

17 http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/initiatives/erm-guidance.html.

18 http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/initiatives/erm-overview.html. 
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4.4 CLOUD AUDITOR

A cloud auditor is a party that can conduct independent assessment of cloud services, information 

system operations, performance, and the security of a cloud computing implementation. A cloud 

auditor can evaluate the services provided by a cloud provider in terms of security controls, privacy 

impact, performance, and adherence to service level agreement parameters.

Auditing is especially important for federal agencies as “agencies should include a contractual 

section enabling third parties to assess security controls of cloud providers” (by Vivek Kundra, 

Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, February 2011). Security controls are the management, 

operational, and technical safeguards or countermeasures employed within an organizational 

information system to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the system and its 

information. For security auditing, a cloud auditor can make an assessment of the security controls 

in the information system to determine the extent to which the controls are implemented correctly, 

operating as intended, and producing the desired outcome with respect to the security requirements 

for the system. The security auditing should include the verification of the compliance with 

regulation and security policy.

4.5 CLOUD BROKER

The NIST Reference Architecture, SP 500-292,

19 defines a Cloud Broker as an entity that manages 

the use, performance, and delivery of cloud services, and negotiates relationships between Cloud 

Providers and Cloud Consumers. As cloud computing evolves, the integration of cloud services may 

become too complex for cloud Consumers to manage. In such cases, a Cloud Consumer may

request cloud services from a Cloud Broker instead of directly contacting a Cloud Provider. Cloud 

Brokers provide a single point of entry for managing multiple cloud services. The key defining 

feature that distinguishes a Cloud Broker from a Cloud Service Provider is the ability to provide a 

single consistent interface to multiple differing providers, whether the interface is for business or 

technical purposes. In general, Cloud Brokers provide services in three categories: 

Intermediation: A Cloud Broker enhances a given service by improving some specific 

capability and providing value-added services to cloud Consumers. The improvement 

can be managing access to cloud services, identity management, performance reporting, 

enhanced security, etc. 

Aggregation: A Cloud Broker combines and integrates multiple services into one or more new 

services. The Broker provides data and service integration and ensures the secure data 

movement between the cloud Consumer and multiple cloud Providers. 

 

19 http://www.cloudcredential.org/images/pdf_files/nist%20reference%20architecture.pdf
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Arbitrage: Service arbitrage is similar to service aggregation except that the services being 

combined/consolidated are not fixed. Service arbitrage means a Broker has the 

flexibility to choose services from multiple service Providers. 

A Cloud Broker may provide: 

1. Business and relationship support services (business intermediation), and

2. Technical support service (aggregation, arbitrage, and technical intermediation), with a 

key focus on handling interoperability issues among multiple Providers.

4.6 CLOUD CARRIER

A cloud carrier acts as an intermediary that provides connectivity and transport of cloud services 

between cloud consumers and cloud providers. Cloud carriers provide access to consumers through 

network, telecommunication, and other access devices. For example, cloud consumers can obtain 

cloud services through network access devices, such as computers, laptops, mobile phones, mobile 

Internet devices (MIDs), etc. The distribution of cloud services is normally provided by network 

and telecommunication carriers or a transport agent, where a transport agent refers to a business 

organization that provides physical transport of storage media such as high-capacity hard drives. 

Note that a cloud provider will set up service level agreements (SLAs)

20 with a cloud carrier to 

provide services consistent with the level of SLAs offered to cloud consumers, and may require the 

cloud carrier to provide dedicated and encrypted connections between cloud consumers and cloud 

providers.

 

20 SLAs are agreements under the umbrella of the overall cloud computing contract between a CSP and a cloud 

consumer. SLAs define acceptable service levels to be provided by the CSP to its customers in measurable terms. 

The ability of a CSP to perform at acceptable levels is consistent among SLAs, but the definition, measurement and 

enforcement of this performance varies widely among CSPs. A cloud consumer should ensure that CSP performance 

is clearly specified in all SLAs, and that all such agreements are fully incorporated, either by full text or by 

reference, into the CSP contract. [Source: Creating Effective Cloud Computing Contracts for the Federal 

Government – Best Practices for Acquiring IT as a Service https://cio.gov/wpcontent/uploads/downloads/2012/09/cloudbestpractices.pdf
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5 CLOUD COMPUTING USE CASES

Cloud computing use cases describe the consumer goals and actions for using cloud computing 

service offerings. Analyzing business and technical cloud computing use cases and the applicable 

standards provides an intuitive, utility-centric perspective for identifying requirements for all actors 

in the use case. This section leverages the business and technical use case outputs from other NIST 

Cloud Computing Program Working Groups. Section 8 presents an analysis regarding whether 

existing cloud-related standards fulfill key aspects of the use case for USG cloud consumers and 

highlights where the gaps for standardizations exist.

5.1 BUSINESS USE CASES

The Target Business Use Case Working Group produced a template for documenting specific use 

cases. This template includes a section titled “Concept of Operations” in which “Current System” 

and “Desired Cloud Implementation” states are described. The template also gathers information 

about integration with other systems, security requirements, and both local and remote network 

access considerations. A set of business use cases was collected describing candidate USG agency 

cloud deployments. The stories captured in these business use cases help to identify business drivers 

behind the adoption of cloud computing in USG agencies, provide background information on the 

relevant usage context, and expose general agency consumer concerns and issues through specific 

scenarios. 

These use cases thus helped to document key technical requirements for USG cloud-related 

standards in the areas of security, interoperability, and portability studied for the formulation of this 

roadmap. Efforts are now underway to document similar requirements with respect to other key 

considerations, such as accessibility and performance of federal cloud-based business systems and 

services.

The “Cloud First”21 directive provided by the Federal CIO is a more general expansion of this 

analysis to multiple interacting current systems and cloud implementations. This expansion is 

intended to support evolving business processes as further cloud deployments are implemented. 

 

21 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management 

http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/digital-strategy/25-point-implementation-plan-to-reform-federalit.pdf
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5.2 TECHNICAL USE CASES

The SAJACC Working Group has analyzed the output of the Business Use Case group, along with 

other community-provided documents and inputs, and produced a set of detailed cloud computing 

technical use case scenarios. These technical use cases captured and describe in detail the 

requirements, inputs, outputs, and failure and success conditions of cloud operations. They provide 

descriptions of how users or groups of users, called “actors,” interact with one or more cloud 

computing resource systems to achieve specific goals, such as “how to copy data objects into a 

cloud,” or “instantiate a virtual machine within a specific security context.”

The mapping from the high-level business use cases to the SAJACC technical use cases allows a 

detailed understanding of ways in which the business operational stories of specific agency 

consumers identify specific technical requirements. Such requirements, as expressed in SAJACC 

technical use cases, are then well suited to demonstrate the applicability of cloud computing 

software or standards. For example, the business use case of an agency consumer’s move of its 

virtualized computing infrastructure to an IaaS cloud vendor identifies “Virtual Machine (VM)

control: manage virtual machine instance state” as a technical requirement to be met. 

The SAJACC group has gathered detailed examples from U.S. federal agencies and analyzed them 

in terms of these technical use case scenarios. The results from this effort, along with 

demonstrations presented to the SAJACC group meetings, have been used to elucidate applicability 

of standards and the presence of standardization gaps in this current document. The rest of this 

section drives through the high-level business use cases to the general technical requirements 

expressed and analyzes where cloud standards help address these requirements.

5.3 DEPLOYMENT SCENARIO PERSPECTIVE

The “Cloud First” business use case requires more complex interactions between USG agency cloud

consumer and cloud providers. There are three generic scenarios from which interaction scenarios 

are derived, as shown in Figure 7.
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Figure 7 – High-Level Generic Scenarios

Single Cloud System

Scenario 1: Deployment on a single cloud system

Scenario 2: Manage resources on a single cloud system

Scenario 3: Interface enterprise systems to a single cloud system

Scenario 4: Enterprise systems migrated or replaced on a single cloud system

Multiple Cloud Systems (serially, one at a time)

Scenario 5: Migration between cloud systems

Scenario 6: Interface across multiple cloud systems

Scenario 7: Work with a selected cloud system

8. 

Operate 

across 

7. Work with 

a Selected 

Cloud

Clouds Clouds

2. Manage 

a Single 

Cloud

Enterprise Systems

6. Interface Clouds

5. Migrate Between 

Clouds 3. Interface 

to a Cloud 4. Migrate 

to a Cloud

1. 

Deploy 

to a 

Cloud
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Multiple Cloud Systems – (simultaneously, more than one at a time)

Scenario 8: Operate across multiple cloud systems

These technical use cases must also be analyzed in the context of their deployment models and the 

resultant way cloud actors must interact. These considerations identify two fundamental dimensions 

to the spectrum of cloud computing use cases:

• Centralized vs. Distributed, and

• Within vs. Crossing Trust Boundaries

These deployment cases will drive the requirements for cloud standards. They can be identified 

through the following matrix:

a.) Within Trust 

Boundary

b.) Crossing Trust 

Boundary

1.) Centralized i.e., one 

administrative cloud 

domain

Deployment Case 1A Deployment Case 1B

2.) Distributed, i.e., crossing 

administrative cloud 

domains

Deployment Case 2A Deployment Case 2B

Table 2 – Deployment Cases for High Level Scenarios

Deployment Case 1: In the centralized deployment cases, there is one cloud provider under 

consideration at a time. Each cloud provider may service multiple cloud consumers. Each cloud 

consumer has a simple client-provider interaction with the provider. 

Deployment Case 1A: This deployment case is typically a private cloud within a single 

administrative domain and trust boundary wherein policy and governance can be enforced by 

nontechnical means. Use cases within this deployment case may require standards to support the 

following basic technical requirements:

• Simple, consumer-provider authentication;

• VM management;

• Storage management;

• SLAs and performance/energy monitoring;

• Service discovery;

• Workflow management;
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• Auditing; and

• Virtual organizations in support of community cloud use cases.

Deployment Case 1B: This deployment case is typically (commercial) public cloud within a single 

administrative domain but is outside of any trust boundary that a client could use to enforce policy 

and governance. Clients must rely on the cloud provider to enforce policy and governance through 

technical means that are "baked into" the infrastructure. Use cases within this deployment case may 

require standards to support the following additional technical requirements:

• SLAs in support of governance requirements, e.g., national or regional regulatory 

compliance;

• Stronger authentication mechanisms, e.g., Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Certificates, 

etc.;

• Certification of VM isolation through hardware and hypervisor support;

• Certification of storage isolation through hardware support; and

• Data encryption.

Deployment Case 2: In the distributed deployment cases, a single cloud consumer has an 

application that may be distributed across two or more cloud providers and administrative domains 

simultaneously. While the cloud consumer may have simple consumer-provider interactions with 

their application and the providers, more complicated Peer-to-Peer (“P2P”) interactions may be 

required -- between both the consumer and provider and also between the providers themselves.

Deployment Case 2A: This deployment case is typically a federated cloud of two or more 

administrative cloud domains, but where the cloud providers can agree "out of band" how to 

mutually enforce policy and governance -- essentially establishing a common trust boundary. Use 

cases within this deployment case may require standards to support the following basic technical 

requirements:

• P2P service discovery;

• P2P SLA and performance monitoring;

• P2P workflow management;

• P2P auditing;

• P2P security mechanisms for authentication, authorization; and

• P2P virtual organization management.

Deployment Case 2B: This deployment case is typically a hybrid cloud where applications cross a 

private-public trust boundary, or even span multiple public clouds, where both administrative 

domains and trust boundaries are crossed. Consumers must rely on the cloud provider to enforce 

policy and governance through technical means that are "baked into" the infrastructure. 

Applications and services may be distributed and need to operate in a P2P manner. Use cases within 
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this deployment case will require all the standards of the other deployment cases, in addition to the 

following more extensive technical requirements:

• P2P SLAs in support of governance requirements.

The use cases presented in this section will be analyzed with regards to their possible deployment 

scenarios to determine their requirements for standards. This analysis will subsequently be used to 

evaluate the likelihood of each of these deployment cases. Clearly the expected deployment of these 

use cases across the different deployment cases will not be uniform. This non-uniformity will assist 

in producing a prioritized roadmap for cloud standards. Likewise, in reviewing existing standards, 

these use cases – in conjunction with their possible deployment cases – will be used to identify and 

prioritize gaps in available standards.

Based on this analysis, note that Scenarios 1 through 4 could, in fact, be deployed on either a private 

cloud or a public cloud. Hence, the different standards noted in deployment cases 1A and 1B will be 

required. Scenarios 5, 6, and 7 (below) all involve the notion of the serial use of multiple clouds. 

Presumably these different clouds, used serially, could be either private or public. Hence, 

deployment cases 1A and 1B would also apply, but there are additional requirements to achieve 

portability, e.g., Application Programming Interface (API) commonality. Finally, Scenario 8 could 

involve a federated/community cloud or a hybrid cloud. Hence, deployment cases 2A and 2B would 

apply here.
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To summarize the detailed technical use cases for this analysis, the following areas of technical 

requirements are common across all scenarios:

Scenarios Technical Requirements

1. Creating, accessing, updating, deleting data objects in cloud systems; 

2. Moving VMs and virtual appliances between cloud systems;

3. Selecting the best IaaS vendor for private externally hosted cloud system;

4. Tools for monitoring and managing multiple cloud systems; 

5. Migrating data between cloud systems;

6. Single sign-on access to multiple cloud systems;

7. Orchestrated processes across cloud systems;

8. Discovering cloud resources;

9. Evaluating SLAs and penalties; and

10. Auditing cloud systems. 

Table 3 – Scenarios and Technical Requirements
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6 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS

Standards are already available in support of many of the functions and requirements for cloud 

computing described in Section 3 and Section 4. While many of these standards were developed in 

support of pre-cloud computing technologies, such as those designed for web services and the 

Internet, they also support the functions and requirements of cloud computing. Other standards are 

now being developed in specific support of cloud computing functions and requirements, such as 

virtualization.

To assess the state of standardization in support of cloud computing, the NIST Cloud Computing 

Standards Roadmap Working Group has compiled an Inventory of Standards Relevant to Cloud 

Computing http://collaborate.nist.gov/twiki-cloudcomputing/bin/view/CloudComputing/StandardsInventory.

6.1 INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES (IT) STANDARDS LIFE 

CYCLE

Figure 8 is a high-level conceptualization of ways in which IT standards are developed and methods 

by which standards-based IT products, processes, and services are deployed. This figure is not 

meant to imply that these processes occur sequentially. Many of the processes illustrated can and 

should occur concurrently. Some of these processes (e.g., reference implementations, product /

process / service / test tools development, testing, deployment) can and usually do also occur 

outside of the SDO process. These processes provide input and feedback to improve the standards, 

profiles, test tools, and associated stages of product development.

Cloud computing development has been characterized by its emergence during a period in which 

extremely interconnected and fast-moving product cycles have led to an explosion of innovation 

that strains the conventional SDO-based standards development process. While this is a rapidly 

changing area, cloud computing is not unique in this respect, and several other examples exist in 

history of similar periods of rapid change followed by standardization. In the long run, the processes 

that drive IT standards development are likely to follow historical precedent as over-arching 

requirements begin to become clear, and as standards emerge from such processes to fill these 

requirements. We therefore expect conformance testing, conformity assessment, and other processes 

related to the maturity and adoption of standards to emerge. Some evidence of this maturity is 

already starting to become manifest in the cloud standards landscape.
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Figure 8 – IT Standards Life Cycle

6.2 THE ROLE OF CONFORMITY ASSESSMENT TO STANDARDS

Conformity assessment activities form a vital link between standards, which define necessary 

characteristics or requirements, and the products, services, and systems. Conformity assessment 

enables buyers, sellers, consumers, and regulators to have confidence that products, processes, and 

systems sourced in the global market meet specific requirements. It is the demonstration that 

specified requirements relating to a product, process, or system are fulfilled.

The characteristics of cloud computing including on-demand, self-service, and resource pooling 

among multiple tenants need to be considered when establishing conformance regimes for cloud 

services. For example, conformance testing may need to be done online against a production system 

that includes data and applications owned and controlled by other tenants. But privacy may preclude 

inspection of system logs, and it may not be possible to inspect the source code or run debugging 

tools. Test harnesses may not be able to be built into the service but may need to be run as a client 

Requirements

Reference 

Implementation/ Test 

Tool/Product/Service 

Base Standards 

Profile Development

Testing

Deployment

Implementation 

Requirements
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to the cloud service. It may be necessary to establish an account in order to access the service for 

testing.

6.2.1 CONFORMITY ASSESSMENT ACTIVITIES

Conformity assessment procedures provide a means of ensuring that the products, services, systems, 

persons, or bodies have certain required characteristics, and that these characteristics are consistent 

from product to product, service to service, system to system, etc. Conformity assessment can 

include: supplier's declaration of conformity, sampling and testing, inspection, certification, 

management system assessment and registration, the accreditation of the competence of those 

activities, and recognition of an accreditation program's capability. A specific conformity 

assessment scheme or program may include one or more conformity assessment activities. While 

each of these activities is a distinct operation, they are closely interrelated.

Conformity assessment activities can be performed by many types of organizations or individuals. 

Conformity assessment can be conducted by: (1) a first party, which is generally the supplier or 

manufacturer; (2) a second party, which is generally the purchaser or user of the product; (3) a third 

party, which is an independent entity that is generally distinct from the first or second party and has 

no interest in transactions between the two parties; and (4) the government, which has a unique role 

in conformity assessment activities related to regulatory requirements.

Attestation consists of the issuance of a statement, based on a decision following review, that 

fulfillment of specified requirements has been demonstrated. First-party and third-party attestation 

activities are distinguished by the terms declaration (first party), certification (third party), and 

accreditation (third party). 

A supplier’s declaration of conformity is a first party (e.g., supplier) attestation that a product,

process, service, etc., conforms to specified requirements. These requirements may include 

normative documents such as standards, guides, technical specifications, laws, and regulations. The 

supplier may conduct the testing or contract with a third party to do the testing. The test results are

evaluated by the supplier, and when all requirements are met, the supplier issues a formal statement

that the product is in conformance to the requirements. A statement that the product meets specific 

requirements can be included in the product documentation or other appropriate location, and the 

test results and other supporting documentation can be made available when requested.

Certification is a third-party attestation related to products, services, systems, etc. Accreditation is a 

third-party attestation related to a conformity assessment body conveying formal demonstration of 

its competence to carry out specific conformity assessment tasks. Testing laboratory accreditation 

provides formal recognition that a laboratory is competent to carry out specific tests or calibrations 

or types of tests or calibrations.

Rapidly advancing technology and increased international competition make it essential that 

suppliers have an opportunity to utilize all available options to minimize costs and ensure that the 

time to bring a product to market is at a minimum. Conformity assessment is an important aspect in 
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the development of product, processes and services, but this assessment does add costs and time to 

the development cycle.

6.2.2 GOVERNMENT USE OF CONFORMITY ASSESSMENT SYSTEMS

Federal conformity-assessment activities are a means of providing confidence that the products, 

services, systems, etc. regulated or purchased by federal agencies, or that are the subject of federal 

assistance programs, have the required characteristics and/or perform in a specified manner. The 

NTTAA directs NIST to coordinate federal, state, and local government standards and conformity

assessment activities with those of the private sector, with the goal of eliminating unnecessary 

duplication and complexity in the development and promulgation of conformity assessment 

requirements and measures. Conformity assessment that leverages existing private-sector programs 

can help lower the cost of implementation for agencies, and also provide added impetus for 

innovation and competitiveness. Numerous federal agencies are engaged in conformity assessment 

activities. In addition, as part of its role mandated by the NTTAA, many federal programs utilize 

NIST support to help design and implement appropriate and effective conformity assessment 

programs.
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6.2.3 VISUALIZATION OF CONFORMITY ASSESSMENT PROCESSES

Figure 9 – Conformity Assessment Infrastructure provides an overview of the range of activities 

that can occur in conformity assessment and the relationships between them. 

Figure 9 – Conformity Assessment Infrastructure
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Figure 10 – Accreditation Process shows the relationships for the laboratory accreditation process. 

The key aspect of the process is the identification of the standards, test methods, test tools, and 

other technical requirements by the procurement agency as they apply to the products, services, 

systems, etc., to be tested. 

Figure 10 – Accreditation Process
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An example of a conformity assessment system using accredited testing laboratories and 

certification is provided in Figure 11 – Assessment Process. The process starts with the submission 

by the supplier of the product, service, or system to a third-party accredited testing laboratory. The 

laboratory tests the product in accordance with the requirements and forwards the test results to the 

supplier. If the results are satisfactory to the supplier, they will be forwarded by the laboratory to the 

validation authority designated by the procurement agency in coordination with the qualified 

products list (QPL) owner. These experts will review the test reports and will make a 

recommendation as to their acceptance to the QPL owner. If the QPL owner agrees with the 

recommendations, the product, service, or system will be listed.

Figure 11 – Assessment Process

6.2.4 CURRENT STATE OF CONFORMITY ASSESSMENT IN CLOUD COMPUTING

As described elsewhere in this document, standards specific to cloud computing are beginning to 

emerge, and several aspects of the conformance testing and conformity assessment processes 

described above are also starting to take place, conducted by a variety of organizations. In some 

cases, such as the CDMI, OCCI, OVF, and CIMI standards discussed below, industry-sponsored 

testing events and “plug-fests” are being advertised and conducted with participation from a variety 

of vendors and open source projects and community-based developers. In other cases, either the 

standards are not yet mature enough to permit such testing, or the participants have not yet exposed 

the conformity assessment processes to public view.
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6.3 CATEGORIZING THE STATUS OF STANDARDS

Innovation in IT means that IT standards are constantly being developed, approved, and maintained. 

Revisions to previous editions of standards may or may not be backward-compatible. Table 4 –

Standards Maturity Model provides an indication of the maturity level of a standard. Some SDOs 

require two or more implementations before final approval of a standard. Such implementations 

may or may not be commercially available products or services. In other cases, an SDO may be 

developing standards while commercial products or services are already being sold that conform to 

early drafts. (In such cases, companies take on the risk of creating products or services that may not 

conform to the final standard.)

Maturity Level Definition

No Standard SDOs have not initiated any standard development projects.

Under Development SDOs have initiated standard development projects.

Open source projects have been initiated.

Approved Standard

SDO-approved standard is available to public.

Some SDOs require multiple implementations before final 

designation as a “standard.”

Technically Stable

The standard is stable and its technical content is mature. No 

major revisions or amendments are in progress that will affect 

backward compatibility with the original standard. 

Reference 

Implementation Reference implementation is available.

Testing Test tools are available. 

Testing and test reports are available.

Commercial 

Availability

Several products/services from different vendors exist on the 

market to implement this standard.

Market Acceptance

Widespread use by many groups.

De facto or de jure market acceptance of standards-based 

products/services.

Sunset Newer standards (revisions or replacements) are under 

development.

Table 4 – Standards Maturity Model
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6.4 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS FOR INTEROPERABILITY AND PORTABILITY

Cloud platforms should make it possible to securely and efficiently move data in, out, and among 

cloud providers and to make it possible to port applications from one cloud platform to another. 

Data may be transient or persistent, structured or unstructured and may be stored in a file system, 

cache, relational or non-relational database. Cloud interoperability means that data can be processed 

by different services on different cloud systems through common specifications. Cloud portability 

means that data can be moved from one cloud system to another and that applications can be ported 

and run on different cloud systems at an acceptable cost. 

The migration path to cloud computing should preserve existing investments in technologies 

which are appropriate to the cloud system, and that enables the coexistence and interoperability of 

on-premises software and cloud services. Additionally, the migration to a cloud system should 

enable various multiple cloud platforms seamless access between and among various cloud

services, to optimize the cloud consumer expectations and experience. 

Cloud interoperability allows seamless exchange and use of data and services among various cloud 

infrastructure offerings and to use the data and services exchanged to enable them to operate 

effectively together.

Cloud portability allows two or more kinds of cloud infrastructures to seamlessly use data and 

services from one cloud system and be used for other cloud systems.

For example, a financial application might use a petabyte of data, but that data might be securely 

housed in a single cloud database, making it relatively easy to port. On the other hand, a customer 

relationship management (CRM) application running in the cloud system might process only a 

terabyte of data but which is shared among thousands of users; moving the CRM application – and 

all its distributed data – from one cloud system to another would be more challenging. Overall, 

functionality of cloud interoperability is preferable.

6.4.1 CLOUD STANDARDS FOR INTEROPERABILITY

Interoperability may be assessed in terms of the NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture at 

the IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS levels. Each of these levels, which may be combined in any particular 

cloud service or product in practice, presents special considerations, and as a result, the standards 

landscape is intrinsically unique and specific to each level.

At the IaaS level, two published standard sets exist that are applicable, the Open Cloud Computing 

Interface (OCCI) specification set from Open Grid Forum and the Cloud Infrastructure 

Management Interface (CIMI) set from the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). OCCI, 

published in early 2011, is slightly more general in formulation and presents a generic boundarylevel protocol for achieving RESTful control of a target infrastructure within the given boundary. It 

has been applied to virtual machine instantiation and control, provision and discovery of network 
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features and other internal features, and has an extensible, self-describing feature set. CIMI, more 

recently developed and published in late 2012, has a tightly described calling sequence and also 

provides features that conform to DMTF’s Common Information Model (CIM). Each of these 

standard sets has seen significant uptake, and several available cloud system products either already 

implement or plan to implement at least one of them. While these IaaS standard sets are so far 

separate, OGF and DMTF have stated that they have a work register in place and that they continue 

to discuss the possibility of merging these efforts in the future.

In PaaS applications, an extensive ecosystem of vendor-specific products that are not 

interchangeable has emerged. A recent effort to produce a PaaS-specific standard22 has been started 

by the OASIS Cloud Application Management Protocol (CAMP) technical committee, with support 

from several industry participants, and is making rapid progress towards producing a workable 

specification.

In the case where a SaaS application is consumed through a web browser, there may be many 

standards that are used to achieve interoperability between what is essentially a web server and the 

user’s browser, such as IP (v4, v6), TCP, HTTP, SSL/TLS, HTML, XML, REST, Atom, 

AtomPub, RSS, and JavaScript/JSON. None of these web standards are cloud-specific, and these 

same standards are being used in many web browser-based management interfaces.

Where data is acted on by multiple services, cloud or otherwise, there are various standards that 

enable interoperability. Also important are interoperability standards for distributed applications 

such as SOAP, WS-* and ebXML. Other standards that can be used for interoperability between 

cloud services include OpenID, Odata, CDMI, AMQP, and XMPP. Most important for 

interoperability are canonical data content formats, typically today expressed using XML standards. 

Such standard canonical formats include “nouns,” i.e., the data objects being acted on, but also 

(implicitly or explicitly) the “verbs,” i.e., the actions that a receiving service may or should take on 

such a data object (e.g., Sync, Process, Get, Show, etc.). While “verbs” may be somewhat generic, 

such canonical formats are in general specific to a particular domain. 

Various standards exist corresponding to different application domains (e.g., OAGi BODs for 

business documents or ODF and OOXML for office productivity documents). Also important is the 

stack of interoperability standards for interfaces, packaging, and transport such as SOAP, WS-* and 

ebXML. Since the SaaS area is so wide-ranging, cloud-based SaaS products are likely to continue to 

exercise and to explore the full range of Internet protocols for their communication and interfaces. It 

is more likely that data formats and metadata-based interchange methods will be standardized in 

cloud system products rather than having SaaS interfaces themselves converge. Examples of such 

 

22 ID Cloud-PaaS https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.../IDCloud-paas-v1c.odt
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data format description standardization include the Data Format Description Language (DFDL) 

from OGF and the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) data-container metadata model of the 

Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). As the cloud computing landscape is currently 

heavily populated by vendor-specific formats, such general-purpose standardization efforts may be 

crucial to achieving interoperability at the SaaS level.

As appropriate, some of these interfaces will be tested and analyzed by NIST to validate their

capabilities against the list of cloud computing use cases. Opportunities will also be made available 

for the vendor and open source community to demonstrate the applicability of standards and APIs to 

the defined NIST SAJACC cloud computing technical use cases.

6.4.2 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS FOR PORTABILITY

Over the last year, much progress has been made on new standards in this area. Open Virtualization 

Format (OVF) from the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), for example, was developed 

to address portability concerns between various virtualization platforms. It consists of metadata 

about a virtual machine image or groups of images that can be deployed as a unit. It provides a 

mechanism to package and deploy services as either a virtual appliance or used within an enterprise 

to prepackage known configurations of a virtual machine image or images. It may contain 

information regarding the number of CPUs, memory required to run effectively, and network 

configuration information. It also can contain digital signatures to ensure the integrity of the 

machine images being deployed along with licensing information in the form of a machine-readable 

EULA (End User License Agreement) so that it can be understood before the image(s) is deployed. 

Significant progress has also been made in the creation of new standards focused on portability 

concerns at higher levels of abstraction such as the cloud service and application. Topology and 

Orchestration Services for Applications (TOSCA) from OASIS, for example, was developed to 

address portability concerns between services and applications that may be required to be deployed 

on different cloud providers and platforms due to reasons such as regulatory concerns, changing 

business and market factors, or evolving technical requirements. TOSCA provides a machinereadable language to describe the relationships between components, requirements, and capabilities. 

The intent is to facilitate service and life cycle management of services and applications in IaaS, 

PaaS, and SaaS environments while enabling the specification of life cycle operations at that level 

of abstraction, e.g., deploy, patch, shutdown, in a cloud platform and provider independent fashion. 

As of February 2013, the TOSCA specification had completed a 30-day public review. A primer, 

which includes a chapter on the relationship between OVF and TOSCA is under development.

A future direction of workloads data and metadata standardization is to help improve the 

automation of inter-cloud system workload deployment. Concepts such as standardized SLAs, 

sophisticated inter-virtual machine network configuration and switching information, and software 

license information regarding all of the various components that make up the workload are 

possibilities.
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Another aspect of portability in the cloud system is that of storage and data (including metadata) 

portability between cloud systems, for example, between storage cloud services and between 

compatible application services in SaaS and PaaS layers. 

Cloud storage services may be seen as a special class of application service, where the storage 

metadata (as distinct from the stored data content) is the application data that a receiving cloud 

system must be able to process. For cloud storage services, as much of the actual data movement 

needs to be done in bulk moves of massive numbers of objects, retaining the data organization (into 

containers, for example) and retaining the associated metadata are main portability requirements. 

Data portability between cloud application services requires standard formats and protocols. The 

canonical data formats commonly involved in portability scenarios may be focused on widely used 

application categories, for example, email or office productivity, or on specific formats used by 

particular domains of use, for example, science or medical domains. Popular methods for 

interchange of data in cloud systems generally leverage representations in either JSON or XML 

formats, and are often customized to particular fields of use through standards. 

Standards are key to achieving portability. Building on existing standards and specifications that are 

known to work and are in widespread use and documenting how the standards are implemented, 

allows developers to continue to use their chosen development languages and tools as they build for 

cloud systems. This keeps migration costs and risks low by enabling organizations to leverage their 

IT staff’s current skills, and by providing a secure migration path that preserves existing 

investments. Examples of languages, tools, and standards that are common in the cloud system 

include programming languages such as Java, C#, PHP, Python and Ruby; Internet protocols for 

service access such as REST, SOAP, and XML; federated identity standards for service 

authentication such as SAML and OAuth; and standards for managing virtualized environments. 

Standards continue to rapidly evolve in step with technology. Hence, cloud standards may be at 

different stages of maturity and levels of acceptance. OVF, for example, is an open standard for 

packaging and distributing virtual appliances. Originally offered as a proprietary format to the 

DMTF, OVF was first published in March 2009, and subsequently adopted in August 2010 as a 

national standard by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). 

When a provider claims conformance with any other standard, it should cite the specific version and 

publish implementation, errata, and testing notes. This will provide the transparency necessary for 

informed consumer choice, as well as ensure reasonably seamless technical interoperability between 

on-premises and cloud virtualized systems.

6.4.3 SUMMARY ON INTEROPERABILITY AND PORTABILITY

Substantial progress has been made by SDOs to develop standards that meet specific cloud 

computing requirements and use cases. There are now existing standards that support cloud service

interoperability and data portability but gaps remain in the standards, specifically in the PaaS area,
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and current development efforts still need to mature. As cloud standards evolve, they will need to 

describe how services interoperate and how data can be readily ported between cloud offerings.

As cloud standards and IT standards that support cloud implementations change and evolve, the 

issues of governance and orchestration of cloud architectures will become more prevalent and 

simultaneously, how to ‘standardize’ a governance model will need to be updated. Governance of 

the cloud is analogous to the governance of Internet but rather than standardizing on packets of data, 

it is standardizing on how data and services are shared. Cloud standards will need to describe how 

services and data can be readily ported or interoperate between cloud offerings as seamless, 

efficient access to data and services across cloud providers will become the demand signal from 

customers. The SAJACC group has received and has begun analyzing input from several SDOs and 

from federal agencies with regard to this topic, including the area of service agreements and SLAs 

that is explored further in Section 6.6, “Cloud Standards for Performance”.

6.5 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS FOR SECURITY

As noted in SP 800-146, “the term cloud computing encompasses a variety of systems and 

technologies as well as service and deployment models, and business models”. Cloud computing’s 

unique attributes such as elasticity, rapid provisioning and releasing, resource pooling, multitenancy, broad-network accessibility, and ubiquity bring many benefits to cloud adopters, but also 

entails specific security risks associated with the type of adopted cloud and deployment mode. To 

accelerate the adoption of cloud computing, and to advance the deployment of cloud services, 

solutions coping with cloud security threats need to be addressed. Many of the threats that cloud 

providers and consumers face can be dealt with through traditional security processes and 

mechanisms such as security policies, cryptography, identity management, intrusion 

detection/prevention systems, and supply chain vulnerability analysis. However, risk management 

activities must be undertaken to determine how to mitigate the threats specific to different cloud 

models and to analyze existing standards for gaps that need to be addressed.

Securing the information systems and ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of 

information and information being processed, stored, and transmitted are particularly relevant as 

these are the high-priority concerns and present a higher risk of being compromised in a cloud 

computing system. Cloud computing implementations are subject to local physical threats as well as 

remote, external threats. 

Consistent with other applications of IT, the threat sources include accidents, natural disasters that 

induce external loss of service, hostile governments, criminal organizations, terrorist groups, and 

malicious or unintentional vulnerabilities exploited through internal, external, authorized, or 

unauthorized access to the system. The complexity of the cloud computing architecture supporting 

three service types and four deployment models, and the cloud characteristics, specifically multitenancy, heighten the need to consider data and systems protection in the context of logical, 

physical boundaries and data flow separation.
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Possible types of security challenges for cloud computing services include the following:

• Compromises to the confidentiality and integrity of data in transit to and from a cloud 

provider and at rest;

• Attacks which take advantage of the homogeneity and power of cloud computing 

systems to rapidly scale and increase the magnitude of the attack;

• A consumer’s unauthorized access (through improper authentication or authorization, or 

exploit of vulnerabilities introduced maliciously or unintentionally) to software, data, 

and resources provisioned to, and owned by another authorized cloud consumer;

• Increased levels of network-based attacks that exploit software not designed for an 

Internet-based model and vulnerabilities existing in resources formerly accessed through 

private networks;

• Limited ability to encrypt data at rest in a multi-tenancy environment;

• Portability constraints resulting from the lack of standardization of cloud services 

application programming interfaces (APIs) that preclude cloud consumers to easily 

migrate to a new cloud service provider when availability requirements are not met;

• Attacks that exploit the physical abstraction of cloud resources and exploit a lack of 

transparency in audit procedures or records;

• Attacks that take advantage of known, older vulnerabilities in virtual machines that have 

not been properly updated and patched; 

• Attacks that exploit inconsistencies in global privacy policies and regulations;

• Attacks that exploit cloud computing supply chain vulnerabilities to include those that 

occur while cloud computing components are in transit from the supplier to the cloud 

service provider;

• Insider abuse of their privileges, especially cloud provider’s personnel in high risk roles 

(e.g. system administrators; and

• Interception of data in transit (man-in-the-middle attacks).
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Some of the main security objectives for a cloud computing implementer should include:

• Protect consumers’ data from unauthorized access, disclosure, modification or 

monitoring. This includes supporting identity management and access control policies 

for authorized users accessing cloud services. This includes the ability of a customer to 

make access to its data selectively available to other users.

• Prevent unauthorized access to cloud computing infrastructure resources. This includes 

implementing security domains that have logical separation between computing 

resources (e.g. logical separation of customer workloads running on the same physical 

server by VM monitors [hypervisors] in a multi-tenant environment) and using secureby-default configurations.

• Deploy in the cloud web applications designed and implemented for an Internet threat 

model.

• Challenges to prevent Internet browsers using cloud computing from attacks to mitigate 

end-user security vulnerabilities. This includes taking measures to protect internetconnected personal computing devices by applying security software, personal firewalls, 

and patch maintenance.

• Include access control and intrusion detection and prevention solutions in cloud 

computing implementations and conduct an independent assessment to verify that the 

solutions are installed and functional. This includes traditional perimeter security 

measures in combination with the domain security model. Traditional perimeter security 

includes restricting physical access to network and devices; protecting individual 

components from exploitation through security patch deployment; setting as default 

most secure configurations; disabling all unused ports and services; using role-based 

access control; monitoring audit trails; minimizing privileges to minimum necessary; 

using antivirus software; and encrypting communications.

• Define trust boundaries between cloud provider(s) and consumers to ensure that the 

responsibilities to implement security controls are clearly identified.

• Implement standardized APIs for interoperability and portability to support easy 

migration of consumers’ data to other cloud providers when necessary.
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6.6 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS FOR PERFORMANCE

There are numerous reasons why cloud computing standards for performance are needed in today’s 

market. Consumers need to be able to objectively determine the costs and benefits of moving to 

cloud services; to validate claims of performance by cloud providers; and to objectively compare 

services from multiple providers in order to better meet a specific need.

Determining performance involves establishing a set of metrics that will provide a clear picture of 

how a given cloud service performs. This is complex due to the fact that specific metrics and 

standards will be needed for not only specific categories of services, but also due to the domains in 

which they are needed. For example, dealing with private healthcare data will need performance 

standards relating to both privacy and security. Standards might be needed for attributes that are 

associated with the service such as network performance. Additionally, standards are needed that 

measure attributes specific to cloud service such as virtual machine performance.

While not an exhaustive list, other potential performance aspects relevant to the cloud include:

• Management performance

• Benchmark performance

• Cloud service life cycle elements:

o Negotiation performance

o Instantiation performance

o Termination performance

• Performance testing

o Monitoring

o Auditing

In the end, these performance standards will be of interest to many of the stakeholders involved in 

cloud computing. Cloud consumers and providers will use these standards and metrics as a basis for 

creating measurable and enforceable service level agreement contracts. Auditors will be able to 

measure performance for their customers. Cloud brokers will need these standards to ensure that 

their customer’s specific needs are met. Cloud providers will be performing self-evaluations on 

their own offerings. 
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The topic of performance includes considerations related to monitoring, reporting, measuring, 

scaling, and right-sizing cloud resources to meet the expected or experienced demand. This area 

deserves careful consideration, as it relates directly to the factors that control the potential cost 

savings to the government from the use of cloud computing. 

Performance can potentially be scaled to meet conditions of anticipated or real-world demand, 

within the parameters of a cloud service agreement. It is therefore crucial that such agreements 

contain all necessary parameters that relate to the conditions for delivery of the associated cloud 

service or product. Only by careful measurement and by proper anticipation of peak workload 

conditions, backed by appropriate service remedies, credits, or penalties and appropriate fallback 

arrangements, can true cost savings be realized with proper delivery of services. 

Agencies using cloud services should be careful to include suitable performance, monitoring, and 

emergency metrics and conditions into the cloud service master agreement and associated SLA. 

These elements, reflecting the agencies given mission and goals, will help to ensure that each 

agency will pay only for needed services.

Cloud services are particularly well suited to deployment of automated terms and conditions for the 

delivery of these services. While the basic parameters, legal, and cost controls for cloud services 

require agency approval and human-mediated review, automated tools should be deployed where 

appropriate to ensure conditions such as failover in the event of cloud service component failure or 

compromise, and scaling to meet emergent needs or to grow or shrink service delivery according to 

cost and/or demand, and other relevant features. 

Wherever possible, standards-based methods for monitoring, measuring, and scaling delivery of the 

resources to meet agency missions should be pursued.

6.6.1 CLOUD STANDARDS FOR SERVICE AGREEMENTS

At the moment, most cloud service agreements are expressed in human-readable terms for review 

by legal staff and management. Tools are increasingly available, however, for expression of service 

agreement conditions, remedies, and provisions that can be expressed in machine-readable terms 

and that can even serve as the basis for service templates that can be provisioned automatically, 

directly from the service agreement template.

Examples of these methods can be seen in several open source products based on the WSAgreement and WS-Agreement-Negotiation specifications from OGF. Recent work from an interSDO joint task force led by TM Forum has also produced a white paper23 describing the 

 

23 https://www.tmforum.org/WhitePapers/CloudMonetization/47730/article.html
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considerations for end-to-end service agreement management specifically oriented towards 

management of multiple cloud service SLAs. The possibility of “TOSCA service template 

extension to support SLA management and possible mapping to SID information framework,” is 

also discussed.

The TM Forum has developed a set of standards to help in the implementation and management of 

services that span multiple partners in a “multi-cloud” system. Organized as "packs", these 

standards focus on managing service level agreements between partners, and ensure consistency in 

the management of information across aggregated services with particular emphasis where these 

services cross multi-company boundaries. There are Business, Technical, and Accelerator Packs 

that have been published; these documents augment the Cloud Service Level Agreement Handbook 

(GB917) that was published by the TM Forum in April 2012. The TM Forum has also developed a 

series of documents working primarily with large-scale enterprises and ensuring that their best 

practice needs are met in the delivery of cloud services.

6.6.2 CLOUD STANDARDS FOR MONITORING

The situation with regard to cloud service monitoring is less well developed than for other areas due 

to the multiplicity of underlying products and the lack of a single set of well-defined monitoring and 

metric terms. To address this need, the NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture and 

Taxonomy group is developing a set of terms related to monitoring and metrics for service 

agreements, including SLAs. 

The input from this group and from the TM Forum-led joint cross-SDO report discussed above will 

be used by the Business Use Case and SAJACC groups to develop use case scenarios that can be 

used to identify appropriate standards and standards gaps in this area.

ITU-T’s establishment of a cloud computing resource management area of study, a roadmap for the 

area of study and the initiation of related supporting standards, is beginning to address the closure of 

some of the standards gaps in cloud computing monitoring. The roadmap outlines the standards that 

are needed in order to monitor the health, QoS, and reliability of cloud services that are based on the 

aggregation of services from one or more cloud service providers.

6.7 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS FOR ACCESSIBILITY

Accessibility is relevant to cloud computing services at the application level where a human 

interacts with an application. This is where accessibility is measured. Therefore, many of the 

existing accessibility standards for ICT applications are relevant to cloud computing applications.

The U.S. Access Board is an independent federal agency devoted to accessibility for people with 

disabilities. The Access Board develops and maintains design criteria for the built environment, 

transit vehicles, telecommunications equipment, and for electronic and information technology. It 
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also provides technical assistance and training on these requirements and on accessible design and 

enforces accessibility standards that cover federally funded facilities.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended (29 U.S.C. 794d), requires that Federal 

employees with disabilities have access to and use of information and data that are comparable to 

the access and use by federal employees who are not individuals with disabilities. Section 508 also 

requires that individuals with disabilities, who are members of the public seeking information or 

services from a federal agency, have access to and use of information and data that are comparable 

to that provided to the public who are not individuals with disabilities. Both of these requirements 

must be met unless an undue burden would be imposed on the agency.

Section 508 standards that would be applicable for many cloud computing applications are: 

Subpart B -- Technical Standards 1194.21 Software applications and operating systems; § 1194.22 

Web-based intranet and internet information and applications; and 1194.23 Telecommunications 

products. The Access Board is in the process of revising the Section 508 standards. This is the first 

major revision since the standards were initially published in 2001. The initial product oriented 

approach to requirements is being replaced with a more functional approach. The Access Board 

plans to reference the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 

(http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ ), which is an international voluntary consensus guideline.

Additional voluntary consensus standards that may be applicable to cloud computing applications 

are: ISO 9241-20:2008, Ergonomics of human-system interaction -- Part 20: Accessibility 

guidelines for information/communication technology (ICT) equipment and services; ISO 9241-

171:2008, Ergonomics of human-system interaction -- Part 171: Guidance on software accessibility; 

ANSI/HFES 200 Human Factors Engineering of Software User Interfaces (Parts 1, 2, and 3); and 

ISO/IEC 24751-1:2008, Information technology -- Individualized adaptability and accessibility in elearning, education and training -- Part 1: Framework and reference model.

The White House released a memorandum Strategy Plan for Improving Management of Section 508 

of the Rehabilitation Act, January 24, 201324. The strategic plan provides a comprehensive and 

structured approach to further improve agencies’ management of the requirements of Section 508. 

The objective is to ensure that all electronic and information technology (EIT) that is developed, 

procured, maintained, or used by the federal government is accessible, as required by Section 508 of 

the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

 

24 www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/procurement/memo/strategi-plan-508-compliance.pdf
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7 CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS MAPPING

One approach to cloud computing standards mapping is to map relevant standards using the 

conceptual model and the cloud computing taxonomy from the NIST Cloud Computing Reference 

Architecture and Taxonomy Working Group. As presented in Figure 12, the cloud computing 

conceptual model is depicted as an integrated diagram of system, organizational, and process 

components. The cloud computing taxonomy produced by the same working group has provided 

further categorizations for the security, interoperability, and portability aspects for cloud computing.

While many standards are generally relevant to these cloud computing areas, the following sections 

will map those specifically relevant cloud standards and capture their standard maturity status in a 

tabular format. The online cloud standards inventory (as described in Section 5) will be the place to 

maintain and track other relevant standards. Some standards may apply to more than one category 

from the cloud taxonomy and therefore may be listed more than once.

Figure 12 – The Combined Conceptual Reference Diagram
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7.1 SECURITY STANDARDS MAPPING

The following tables map security standards to various security categories and list the status (ref:

Section 6.3/ Table 4 – Standards Maturity Model). Some of the listed standards apply to more than 

one category and are therefore listed more than once.

Categorization Available Standards SDO Status

Authentication 

& 

Authorization

RFC 5246

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/ Transport 

Layer Security (TLS)

IETF Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

RFC 3820: X.509

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Proxy 

Certificate Profile

IETF Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

RFC5280: Internet X.509

Public Key Infrastructure Certificate and 

Certificate Revocation List (CRL) Profile

IETF Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

RFC 5849

OAuth (Open Authorization Protocol)

IETF Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

ISO/IEC 9594-8:2008 | X.509 

Information technology -- Open Systems 

Interconnection -- The Directory: Publickey and attribute certificate frameworks

ISO/IEC

&

ITU-T

Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

ISO/IEC 29115 | X.1254

Information technology -- Security 

techniques -- Entity authentication 

assurance framework

ISO/IEC

&

ITU-T

Approved Standard

FIPS 181

Automated Password Generator

NIST Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

FIPS 190

Guideline for the Use of Advanced 

Authentication Technology Alternatives

NIST Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

FIPS 196

Entity Authentication Using Public Key 

Cryptography

NIST Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

OpenID Authentication OpenID Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

eXtensible Access Control Markup Language 

(XACML)

OASIS Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) OASIS Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Table 5 – Security Standards: Authentication and Authorization
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Categorization Available Standards SDO Status

Confidentiality

RFC 5246

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/ Transport 

Layer Security (TLS)

IETF Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Key Management Interoperability Protocol 

(KMIP)

OASIS Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

XML Encryption Syntax and Processing W3C Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

FIPS 140-2

Security Requirements for Cryptographic 

Modules

NIST Approved Standard

Testing

Market Acceptance

FIPS 185

Escrowed Encryption Standard (EES)

NIST Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

FIPS 197

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

NIST Approved Standard

Testing

Market Acceptance

FIPS 188

Standard Security Label for Information 

Transfer

NIST Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Table 6 – Security Standards: Confidentiality

Categorization Available Standards SDO Status

Integrity

XML signature (XMLDSig) W3C Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

FIPS 180-4

Secure Hash Standard (SHS)

NIST Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

FIPS 186-4

Digital Signature Standard (DSS)

NIST Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

FIPS 198-1

The Keyed-Hash Message Authentication 

Code (HMAC)

NIST Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Table 7 – Security Standards: Integrity
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Categorization Available Standards SDO Status

Identity 

Management

X.idmcc

Requirement of IdM in Cloud Computing

ITU-T Under Development

FIPS 201-1

Personal Identity Verification (PIV) of 

Federal Employees and Contractors

NIST Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Service Provisioning Markup Language 

(SPML) 

OASIS Approved Standard

Web Services Federation Language (WSFederation) Version 1.2OASIS Approved Standard

WS-Trust 1.3 OASIS Approved Standard

Security Assertion Markup Language 

(SAML)

OASIS Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

OpenID Authentication 1.1 OpenID 

Foundation

Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Table 8 – Security Standards: Identity Management
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Categorization Available Standards SDO Status

Security 

Monitoring & 

Incident 

Response

ISO/IEC WD 27035-1

Information technology -- Security 

techniques -- Information security incident 

management -- Part 1: Principles of 

incident management

ISO/IEC Under Development

ISO/IEC WD 27035-3

Information technology -- Security 

techniques -- Information security incident 

management -- Part 3: Guidelines for 

CSIRT operations

ISO/IEC Under Development

ISO/IEC WD 27039; Information 

technology -- Security techniques --

Selection, deployment and operations of 

intrusion detection systems

ISO/IEC Under Development

ISO/IEC 18180

Information technology - Specification for 

the Extensible Configuration Checklist 

Description Format (XCCDF) Version 1.2 

(NIST IR 7275)

ISO/IEC Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

X.1500 

Cybersecurity information exchange 

techniques

ITU-T Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

X.1520: Common vulnerabilities and 

exposures

ITU-T Approved Standard

X.1521

Common Vulnerability Scoring System

ITU-T Approved Standard

PCI Data Security Standard PCI Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

FIPS 191

Guideline for the Analysis of Local Area 

Network Security

NIST Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Table 9 – Security Standards: Security Monitoring & Incident Response
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Categorization Available Standards SDO Status

Security 

Controls

Cloud Controls Matrix Version 1.3 CSA Approved Standard

ISO/IEC 27001:2005

Information Technology – Security 

Techniques Information Security 

Management Systems Requirements

ISO/IEC Approved Standard

ISO/IEC WD TS 27017

Information technology -- Security 

techniques -- Information security 

management - Guidelines on information 

security controls for the use of cloud 

computing services based on ISO/IEC 

27002

ISO/IEC Under Development

ISO/IEC 27018

Code of Practice for Data Protection 

Controls for Public Cloud Computing 

Services

ISO/IEC Under Development

ISO/IEC 1st WD 27036-4

Information technology – Security 

techniques – Information security for 

supplier relationships – Part 4: Guidelines 

for security of cloud services

ISO/IEC Under Development

Table 10 – Security Standards: Security Controls
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Categorization Available Standards SDO Status

Security Policy 

Management

ATIS-02000008

Trusted Information Exchange (TIE)

ATIS Approved Standard

Commercially 

Available

FIPS 199

Standards for Security Categorization of 

Federal Information and Information 

Systems

NIST Approved Standard

Testing

Market Acceptance

FIPS 200

Minimum Security Requirements for 

Federal Information and Information 

Systems

NIST Approved Standard

Testing

Market Acceptance

ISO/IEC 27002

Code of practice for information security 

management

ISO/IEC Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

eXtensible Access Control Markup 

Language (XACML)

OASIS Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Table 11 – Security Standards: Security Policy Management

Categorization Available Standards SDO Status

Availability

ATIS-02000009

Cloud Services Lifecycle Checklist

ATIS Approved Standard

ISO/PAS 22399:2007

Societal security - Guideline for 

incident preparedness and operational 

continuity management

ISO Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Table 12 – Security Standards: Availability
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7.2 INTEROPERABILITY STANDARDS MAPPING

As discussed in Section 6.3, the interoperability of cloud services can be categorized by the 

management and functional interfaces of the cloud services. Many existing IT standards contribute 

to the interoperability between cloud consumer applications and cloud services, and between cloud 

services themselves. There are standardization efforts that are specifically initiated to address the 

interoperability issues in the cloud system. These cloud specific standards are listed in Table 13 –

Interoperability Standards.

Categorization Available Standards SDO Status

Service 

Interoperability

Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface 

(CIMI)

DMTF Approved Standard

IEEE P2301, Draft Guide for Cloud Portability 

and Interoperability Profiles (CPIP)

IEEE Under Development

IEEE P2302, Draft Standard for Intercloud 

Interoperability and Federation (SIIF)

IEEE Under Development

Y.3520

Cloud computing framework for end to end 

resource management.

ITU-T Approved Standard

Cloud Application Management Platform 

(CAMP)

OASIS Under Development

Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) OGF Approved Standard

Data Format Description Language (DFDL) OGF Approved Standard

Topology and Orchestration Specification or 

Cloud Applications (TOSCA),Version 1.0

Committee Specification Draft 06 / Public 

Review Draft 01

OASIS Under Development

Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI)

[Also approved as ISO/IEC 17826:2012, 

Information technology – Cloud Data 

Management Interface (CDMI)]

SNIA Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Commercially 

Available

Table 13 – Interoperability Standards
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7.3 PORTABILITY STANDARDS MAPPING

As discussed in Section 6.4, portability issues in the cloud system include workload and data 

portability. While some of the cloud computing workload portability issues are new, many of 

existing data and metadata standards were developed before the cloud computing era. The following 

table focuses on cloud-specific portability standards.

Categorization Available Standards SDO Status

Data 

Portability

Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) SNIA Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Commercially 

Available

System 

Portability

Open Virtualization Format (OVF), OVF 1.0 

[Also approved as INCITS 469-2010 & 

ISO/IEC 17203: 2011]

DMTF Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Commercial 

Availability

Open Virtualization Format (OVF), OVF 2.0 DMTF Approved Standard

IEEE P2301

Draft Guide for Cloud Portability and 

Interoperability Profiles (CPIP)

IEEE Under Development

Topology and Orchestration Specification for 

Cloud Applications (TOSCA),Version 1.0

Committee Specification Draft 06 / Public 

Review Draft 01

OASIS Under Development

Table 14 – Portability Standards
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7.4 PERFORMANCE STANDARDS MAPPING

As discussed in Section 6.6, performance standards are needed for cloud service agreements and for 

cloud service monitoring, Table 15 – Performance Standards provides a list of current standards that 

may be considered.

Categorization Available Standards SDO Status

Service 

Agreements

Topology and Orchestration Specification for 

Cloud Applications (TOSCA),Version 1.0

Committee Specification Draft 06 / Public 

Review Draft 01

OASIS Under Development

GB917

SLA Management Handbook, Release 3.1

TM 

Forum

Approved Standard

GB963

Cloud SLA Application Note, Version 1.2

TM 

Forum

Approved Standard

TR178

Enabling End-to-End Cloud SLA 

Management, Version 0.4

TM 

Forum

Approved Standard

TR194

Multi-Cloud Service Management Accelerator 

Pack - Introduction, Release 1.0

TM 

Forum

Approved Standard

TR195

Multi-Cloud Service Management Pack -

Business Guide, Release 1.0

TM 

Forum

Approved Standard

TR196

Multi-Cloud Service Management Pack -

Technical Guide, Release 1.0

TM 

Forum

Approved Standard

TR197

Multi-Cloud Service Management Pack –

SLA Business Blueprint

TM 

Forum

Approved Standard

TR198

Multi-Cloud Service Management Pack –

Developer Primer

TM 

Forum

Approved Standard

Table 15 – Performance Standards
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7.5 ACCESSIBILITY STANDARDS MAPPING

As discussed in Section 6.7, adherence to Section 508 accessibility standards would be required for 

many federal cloud computing applications. The Section 508 standards are being revised and are 

incorporating international voluntary consensus standards. The following table lists accessibility 

standards, which may be relevant for federal cloud computing applications.

Categorization Available Standards SDO Status

Accessibility Section 508 standards (Technical Standards 

1194.21 Software applications and operating 

systems; § 1194.22 Web-based intranet and 

internet information and applications; and 

1194.23 Telecommunications products)

US Access 

Board

Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

Under Revision

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 

(WCAG) 2.0

W3C Approved Standard

Market Acceptance

ISO 9241-20:2008, Ergonomics of humansystem interaction -- Part 20: Accessibility 

guidelines for information/communication 

technology (ICT) equipment and services

ISO/IEC Approved Standard

ISO 9241-171:2008, Ergonomics of humansystem interaction -- Part 171: Guidance on 

software accessibility

ISO/IEC Approved Standard

ISO/IEC 24751-1:2008, Information 

technology -- Individualized adaptability and 

accessibility in e-learning, education and 

training -- Part 1: Framework and reference 

model

ISO/IEC Approved Standard

ANSI/HFES 200 Human Factors Engineering 

of Software User Interfaces (Parts 1, 2, and 3)

ANSI Approved Standard

Table 16 – Accessibility Standards
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8 ANALYZING USE CASES TO IDENTIFY STANDARDS GAPS

There are several facets of cloud service interfaces that are candidates for standardization including:

• Management APIs;

• Data Exchange Formats;

• Federated Identity and Security Policy APIs;

• Resource Descriptions; and

• Data Storage APIs.

With these candidate areas in mind, the following business use cases can be analyzed with regard to 

their possible deployment modes (as discussed in Section 4.3) to identify required standards. This 

analysis, in conjunction with the NIST Cloud Standards Inventory, enables the availability of 

relevant existing and emerging standards to be evaluated. Where no suitable standards of any kind 

exist, this is a gap. The priority of the standards or requirements in question is also identified.

8.1 USE CASE: CREATING, ACCESSING, UPDATING, DELETING DATA OBJECTS IN 

CLOUD SYSTEMS

Benefits: Cross-cloud system applications

Deployment Mode Considerations: Basic Create-Read-Update-Delete (CRUD) operations on data 

objects will primarily be done between a single client and provider, and should observe any 

required standards for authentication and authorization.

Standardization Needed: Standard interfaces to metadata and data objects

Possible Standards: CDMI from SNIA
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8.2 USE CASE: MOVING VMS, VIRTUAL APPLIANCES, SERVICES, AND APPLIANCES 

BETWEEN CLOUDS

Benefits: Migration, Hybrid Clouds, Disaster Recovery, Cloudbursting

Deployment Mode Considerations: When moving a VM out of one cloud system and into another as 

two separate actions, conceivably two different ID management systems could be used. When 

moving VMs in a truly hybrid cloud, however, federated ID management standards will be needed.

Standardization Needed: Common VM description format, common service and application 

description format

Possible Standards: OVF from DMTF, TOSCA from OASIS, OpenID, Oauth

8.3 USE CASE: SELECTING THE BEST IAAS CLOUD VENDOR, PUBLIC OR PRIVATE

Benefits: Provide cost-effective reliable deployments

Deployment Mode Considerations: When considering hybrid or distributed (inter)cloud 

deployments, uniform and consistent resource, performance, and policy descriptions are needed.

Standardization Needed: Resource and performance requirements description languages.

Possible Standards: For basic resource descriptions, DMTF CIM and OGF GLUE are candidates. 

Other, more extensive description languages for performance or policy enforcement are to be 

determined. For Master Service Agreements and Service Level Agreements, WS-Agreement and 

WS-Agreement-Negotiation (WS-AG, WS-AN) from OGF; for cloud application and service level 

description of attributes, relationships, requirements, and capabilities, TOSCA from OASIS.

8.4 USE CASE: PORTABLE TOOLS FOR MONITORING AND MANAGING CLOUD 

SYSTEMS

Benefits: Simplifies operations as opposed to individual tools for each cloud

Deployment Mode Considerations: Monitoring and managing are separate but closely related tasks. 

The standards required will differ depending on whether the monitoring and managing must be 

done across trust boundaries or across distributed environments.

Standardization Needed: Standard monitoring and management interfaces to IaaS resources
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Possible Standards: Cloud IaaS management standards include CIMI from DMTF and OCCI from 

OGF; OCCI has also been successfully applied to management of aggregated federated cloud 

systems. PaaS APIs vary widely, but CAMP from OASIS has begun standardization work in this 

area. SaaS standardization on data formats and exchange protocols may be possible. Basic 

monitoring standards exist, such as the Syslog Protocol (IETF RFC 5424), which can be used with 

the Transport Layer Security (TLS) Transport Mapping for Syslog (IETF RFC 5425). Basic 

management standards include the Cloud Management WG from DMTF, and OCCI from OGF.

• An Overview of the IETF Network Management Standards (IETF RFC 6632)

• Simple Network Management Protocol or SNMP (IETF RFC 3411)

• IP Flow Information eXport or IPFIX (IETF RFC 5101)

• Network Configuration Protocol or NETCONF (IETF RFC 6241)

• WS-AG and WS-AN for expression of service agreement monitoring parameters and 

units and for expression of remedy terms and negotiation parameters.

8.5 USE CASE: MOVING DATA BETWEEN CLOUD SYSTEMS

Benefits: Migration between cloud systems, cross-cloud application, and B2B integration

Deployment Mode Considerations: Migrating data from one cloud system to another in two separate 

moves through the client is a simpler case. Migrating data directly from one cloud system to another

will require standards for federated identity, delegation of trust, and secure third-party data 

transfers.

Standardization Needed: Standard metadata/data formats for movement between cloud systems

Standardized query languages (e.g., for NoSQL for IaaS)

Possible Standards: AS4, OAGIS, NoSQL, GridFTP, DFDL, CDMI
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8.6 USE CASE: SINGLE SIGN-ON ACCESS TO MULTIPLE CLOUD SYSTEMS

Benefits: Simplified access, cross-cloud applications

Deployment Mode Considerations: Single sign-on can mean using the same credentials to access 

different cloud systems independently at different times. Single sign-on to access an inter-cloud 

application that spans multiple cloud systems will require federated identity management, 

delegation of trust, and virtual organizations.

Standardization Needed: Federated identity, authorization, and virtual organizations

Possible Standards: OpenID, OAuth, SAML, WS-Federation and WS-Trust, CSA outputs; Virtual 

Organization Management System (VOMS) from OGF.

8.7 USE CASE: ORCHESTRATED PROCESSES ACROSS CLOUD SYSTEMS AND 

ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS

Benefits: Direct support for necessarily distributed systems

Deployment Mode Considerations: This use case is inherently distributed and across trust 

boundaries. This can be generally termed federated resource management and is a central concept in 

the grid computing community. The term inter-cloud can also be used to denote this concept.

Standardizations Needed: To address this use case completely, an entire set of capabilities need to 

be standardized, e.g.:

• Infrastructure services;

• Execution Management services;

• Data services;

• Resource Management services;

• Security services;

• Self-management services; and

• Information services.
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Possible Standards: SOA standards (such as WS-I) and grid standards (such as the OGSA WSRF 

Basic Profile, OGF GFD-R-P.072) exist that cover these areas, but issues around stateful resources, 

callbacks/notifications, and remote content lifetime management has caused these to be eclipsed by 

the simplicity of Representational State Transfer (REST). Hence, standard, REST-based versions of 

these capabilities must be developed. Such work is being done in several organizations, including 

the IEEE.

DMTF and OGF. The OGF Distributed Computing Infrastructure Federations Working Group (DCI 

Federal [DCIfed]-WG) is addressing two usage scenarios: (1) delegation of workload from one 

domain into the other, covering job description, submission, and monitoring; and (2) leasing of 

resources, including resource definition, provisioning, and monitoring. Existing standards to support 

this include WS-Agreement, Job Submission Description Language, GLUE, OGSA Basic 

Execution Service, OCCI, and Usage Record. Specific business application data formats may be 

supported by OASIS.

Workflow and workflow engines will also need standardization and adoption in the cloud arena. 

BPEL is one existing standard but extensions might be needed to efficiently support scientific and 

engineering workflows.

8.8 USE CASE: DISCOVERING CLOUD RESOURCES

Benefits: Selection of appropriate cloud systems for applications

Deployment Mode Considerations: To support inter-cloud resource discovery, secure federated 

catalog standards are needed.

Standardization Needed: Description languages for available resources, Catalogue interfaces

Possible Standards: This use case addresses two areas of standardization: (1) description languages 

for the resources to be discovered, and (2) the discovery APIs for the discovery process itself. Some 

existing standards and tools cover both areas. RDF is a standard formalism for describing resources 

as triples consisting of subject-predicate-object. The Dublin Core is a small fundamental set of text 

elements for describing resources of all types. It is commonly expressed in RDF. Since the Dublin 

Core is a “core” set, it is intended to be extensible for a broad range of application domains.

Such work is being pursued by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. ebXML Registry Information 

Model (ebRIM) actually defines both a description language and a discovery method, ebXML 

Registry Services (ebRS).

ID-WSF also defines both a discovery information model and discovery services that cover 

federated identity and access management. LDAP is an existing standard that has been used to build 

catalogue and discovery services, but issues might occur with regards to read vs. write optimization. 

UDDI is another existing standard from OASIS. A third existing standard is CSW from OGC that 
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uses ebRIM. While this was originally developed to support geospatial applications, it is widely 

used in distributed catalogues that include services. All of these existing standards need to be 

evaluated for suitability for cataloguing and discovery of cloud resources and services.

8.9 USE CASE: EVALUATING SLAS AND PENALTIES

Benefits: Selection of appropriate cloud resources

Deployment Mode Considerations: SLAs will be primarily established between a single client and 

provider, and should observe any required standards for authentication, authorization, and nonrepudiation. The need for SLAs between a single client but across multiple providers will be much 

less common. The difficulty in effectively implementing distributed SLAs will also discourage their 

development.

Standardization Needed: SLA description language

Possible Standards: WS-Agreement (GFD.107) defines a language and a protocol for advertising 

the capabilities of service providers and creating agreements based on creational offers, and for 

monitoring agreement compliance at runtime. This is supported by WS-AgreementNegotiation 

(OGF), which defines a protocol for automated negotiation of offers, counter offers, and terms of 

agreements defined under WS-Agreement-based service agreements.

8.10 USE CASE: AUDITING CLOUD SYSTEMS

Benefits: Ensure regulatory compliance. Verify information assurance.

Deployment Mode Considerations: Auditing will be done primarily between a single client and 

provider, and should observe any required standards for authentication, authorization, integrity, and 

non-repudiation.

Standardization Needed: Auditing standards and verification check lists

Possible Standards: CSA Cloud Audit. Relevant informational work can be found in Guidelines for 

Auditing Grid Certificate Authorities (OGF GFD.169).
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8.11 END-TO-END: CLOUD RESOURCE MANAGEMENT USE CASE

Benefits: Supports customer service in a multi-cloud service provider environment.

Deployment/Management Mode Considerations: This use case involves the management of end-toend health and QoS of the services offered by a cloud service provider that involves the integration 

of several base services offered by multiple cloud service providers, forming composite cloud 

services and applications.

Standardizations Needed: A framework for multi-cloud resource and service management that 

support the manageability for a single cloud service as well as for multiple cloud services

Possible Standards: In order for the composite cloud computing services to work effectively, all the 

prerequisite services within the multi-cloud service system must function properly, and when a 

problem occurs, the service must be restored rapidly and easily. In this use case, there are the two 

types of connection paths, namely Service Delivery Path and Service Management Path. When the 

cloud consumer is experiencing a problem with an application service and contacts a cloud service 

provider support center, the cloud service provider should have visibility into the health and welfare 

of the cloud service provider application service, its underlying cloud infrastructure, as well as the 

local service provider’s network management systems relevant to the voice application service (i.e., 

end-to-end cloud resource management). Standards are needed that would offer ways to build such 

end-to-end and manageable multi-cloud solutions.
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9 USG PRIORITIES TO FILL CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS GAPS

Cloud computing is the result of evolutions of distributed computing technologies, enabled by 

advances in fast and low-cost networks, commoditized faster hardware, practical high-performance 

virtualization technologies, and maturing interactive web technologies. Cloud computing continues 

to leverage the maturity of these underlying technologies, including many standard-based 

technologies and system architecture components. As the previous sections of the cloud computing 

standards survey show, the majority of cloud system relevant standards are from these pre-cloud era 

technologies.

In the meantime, there are emerging challenges in some areas in cloud computing that have been 

addressed by technology vendors and service providers’ unique innovations. New service model 

interactions and the distributed nature in resource control and ownership in cloud computing have 

resulted in new standards gaps. Some of these gaps are introduced by new service model 

interactions and the distributed nature of resource control and ownership in cloud computing and

some are pre-cloud computing era technology standardization gaps that are now brought to the 

forefront.

In this section, first, we use the cloud computing conceptual model from NIST Cloud Computing 

Reference Architecture and Taxonomy Working Group as described in Chapter 3 as the framework 

of reference to identify these gaps in need of standardization. Secondly, we use a broad set of USG

business use cases as described in previous sections and from the NIST Cloud Computing Target 

Business Use Case Working Group, to identify priorities of standardization that will maximize the 

benefits and meet the more urgent needs of federal government consumers.

9.1 AREAS OF STANDARDIZATION GAPS

As the cloud computing conceptual model indicates, cloud computing consumers do not have direct 

visibility into the physical computing resources. Instead, consumers interact with service providers 

through three service model interfaces, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, to gain a view of the abstracted 

computing resource they are using. As described in Chapter 5, Cloud Computing Standards, these 

interaction interfaces can be categorized into two types: (1) functional interfaces that expose the 

primary function of the service, and (2) management interfaces that let the consumers manage the 

rented computing resources. The following areas of standardization gaps are observed through the 

standards inventory.
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9.1.1 SAAS FUNCTIONAL INTERFACES

The varieties of the SaaS applications determine what can be consumed by the SaaS consumer. 

There are varying degrees of functional standardization. SaaS applications are mainly available by

using a web browser, and some are consumed as a web service using other application clients, such 

as standalone desktop applications and mobile applications. Even as most SaaS applications are 

using web and web service standards to deliver these application capabilities, application-specific 

data and metadata standards remain standardization gaps in portability and interoperability. For 

example, email and office productivity application data format standards and interfaces are required 

to achieve interoperability and portability for migrating from existing systems to cloud systems. 

Another important area for standardization is the metadata format and interfaces, in particular, to 

support compliance needs. For example, standard metadata format and APIs to describe and 

generate e-discovery metadata for emails, document management systems, financial account 

systems, etc., will help government consumers to leverage commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and 

government off-the-shelf (GOTS) software products to meet e-discovery requirements. This is 

especially important when email messaging systems, content management systems, or Enterprise 

Resource Planning (ERP) financial systems migrate to a SaaS model.

9.1.2 SAAS SELF-SERVICE MANAGEMENT INTERFACES

Due to the diverse domain and functional differences among SaaS offerings, the management 

interfaces used for the consumers to administer and customize the application functionalities are 

also very diverse. However, certain management functionalities are common, such as those related 

to user account and credential management. These common management functionalities represent 

candidates for interoperability standardization.

9.1.3 PAAS FUNCTIONAL INTERFACES

PaaS functional interfaces encompass the runtime environment with supporting libraries and system 

components for developers to develop and deploy SaaS applications. Standard-based APIs are often 

part of a PaaS offering such that the PaaS provider can enable existing development for a cloudbased hosting system. However, data format for backup and migration of application workload, 

including database serialization/de-serialization, need further standardization to support portability.

9.1.4 BUSINESS SUPPORT, PROVISIONING AND CONFIGURATION

In cloud service management areas, the importance of standard data formats and interfaces to 

describe service-level agreement (SLA) and quality of service (QoS) in traditional IT systems is 

high. While standards do exist for SLA negotiation and automated service condition matching, the 

application of these to the fine level of detail expected for large-scale cloud use cases is just 

developing. Computing resource description and discovery are also in need of standardization as 

consumers transition from buying and managing resources to renting resources in a cloud system.
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This is limited not only to raw computing resources such as virtualized processing, storage, and 

networking resources, but also includes higher-level abstractions of application processing 

resources. A standardization gap identified in a related area is metering and billing of service 

consumptions; data formats and management interfaces are used to report, deliver, and 

communicate this usage information.

9.1.5 SECURITY

As cloud systems are typically external components in a consumer organization’s overall IT system, 

especially in the outsourced (off-site) deployment models, the need to have seamless security 

integration calls for interoperable standard interfaces for authentication, authorization, and 

communication protections. The challenges of identity and access management across different 

network and administration domains are more prominent in the cloud system as the implementation 

of these capabilities within the cloud systems are often not the same organization as consumer 

organization where the identity information originates. Standardization in areas such as identity 

provisioning, management, secure and efficient replication across different systems, and identity 

federation will greatly help to improve the identity management capabilities in cloud systems. A 

related area with specifically wide government usage that can benefit from standardization is single 

sign-on interface and protocols that support strong authentication.

Government IT systems have strong auditing and compliance needs. In many cases, these 

requirements must be in place before a system can be approved for operation. The standardization 

gap in this area exacerbates as the consumer organizations typically do not own or control the 

underlying system resources that implement the system capabilities. Standardization in policies, 

processes, and technical controls that support the security auditing requirements, regulations, and 

law compliance needs to consider the collaboration process between the cloud consumers and 

providers, their roles, and the sharing of the responsibilities in implementing the system capabilities.

9.1.6 ACCESSIBILITY

A standardized “framework” for exchanging an individual’s accessibility requirements does not 

presently exist. A standardized method for automatic recognition of a user’s requirements for 

accessibility would automatically identify the need for having an accessibility requirement known 

after the first request, for example, captioning for all subsequent video. (Note: Such automatic 

recognition features can trigger privacy issues depending how the information is used.)
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9.2 STANDARDIZATION PRIORITIES BASED ON USG CLOUD COMPUTING ADOPTION 

PRIORITIES

As described in the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, some cloud computing business use cases 

have higher priorities than others. The requirements expressed in these high-priority target business 

use cases can be used to prioritize the standardization gaps. For example, various USG groups have 

identified data center consolidation using virtualization technologies as one of the primary goals in 

the next few years. Migrating collaboration applications, including email messaging (email, 

contacts, and calendars) and online office productivity application, to the cloud system is also 

quoted as an early target of government cloud operation.

By analyzing the USG cloud computing target business use cases with their specific technical 

requirements, one can point out the following basic drivers that can be used to prioritize cloud 

computing standard gaps:

• The focus on supporting migration of system workload, including data, metadata and 

processing logic of existing in-house IT systems, to cloud-based systems to ensure 

continuous operation; this focus is centered on portability standards.

• The need to have interoperability between existing in-house IT systems and cloud-based 

systems, as cloud-deployed systems will be only a part of the overall enterprise system; this 

need is centered on interoperability standards, including security standards.

• The need to help government consumers to choose and buy the most cost-effective 

solutions. If a cloud solution is not as economical as an in-house traditional IT system, there 

is no financial incentive to move the system to the cloud system.

Based on these understandings, the following areas of standardization gaps in cloud computing are 

of higher priority for USG cloud consumers:

9.2.1 SECURITY AUDITING AND COMPLIANCE

Data format standards for auditing, compliance data and metadata are needed. Standard interfaces to 

retrieve and manage these data and metadata assets are also required to be integrated with existing 

tools and processes. In addition, policy, process and technical control standards are needed to 

support more manageable assessment and accreditation processes, which are often a prerequisite 

before a system is put in operation.
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9.2.2 IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT

As described earlier, security integration of a cloud system into existing enterprise security 

infrastructure is a must for the majority of government systems with moderate and greater impact. 

Existing practices of external cloud-based components in identity and access management is often 

based on proprietary and custom integration solutions. Constant and standard ways of provisioning 

identity data, managing identity data, and replicating to-and-from cloud system components, are 

needed to ensure that consumer organizations’ short-term and long-terms needs are met.

Many government systems are required to have strong authentication, such as two-factor 

authentication implemented in an Internet-deployed system. Standards in supporting single sign-on 

and strong authentication are a must for these types of systems.

9.2.3 SAAS APPLICATION SPECIFIC DATA AND METADATA

To support the urgent need to migrate certain applications to the cloud system, application-specific 

data and metadata format standards are required. This is an area where a lot of SaaS providers 

currently help consumer organizations to migrate their existing system by offering custom 

conversion and migration support. However, without standards in data and metadata format for 

these applications, the potential danger exists of creating non-interoperable islands of cloud 

solutions and vendor lock-in. For example, some SaaS email solutions may not be fully 

interoperable with in-house email and calendaring solutions. There are specific email working 

groups25 in the federal cloud computing initiative that are looking into putting forward specific 

metadata standardization requirements for email security, privacy, and record management. Other 

SaaS functional areas, such as document management and financial systems, are also among the 

high-priority areas where standards in data and metadata are needed.

9.2.4 RESOURCE DESCRIPTION AND DISCOVERY

Description and discovery of computing resources needs are usually the first steps for consumers to 

take to start using cloud computing. Standard methods to describe resources will facilitate 

programmatically interoperable cloud applications to discover and use cloud computing resources 

such as computing resources, storage resources, or application resources. To establish private or 

community cloud computing as a way to implement data center consolidation, standards for these 

areas are important to avoid the implementation of vendor-specific interfaces, and also helps to 

increase the dynamic provisioning capabilities of the solution and utility of the computing 

resources. 

 

25 https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=4c4e37f4f1bcd2cb8d0a16f0e1b0ddbe
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The following table summarizes the areas of standardization gaps and standardization priorities 

based on USG cloud computing adoption requirements.

9.2.5 SUMMARY OF STANDARDIZATION GAPS AND STANDARDIZATION PRIORITIES

Table 17 – Areas of Standardization Gaps and Standardization Priorities provides a mapping of 

present standards gaps and how they relate to USG high priorities.

Area of Standardization Gaps High Priorities for Standardization Based 

On USG Requirements

SaaS Functional Interfaces (9.1.1 / page 70), 

e.g.,

- Data format and interface standards for 

email and office productivity

- Metadata format and interface 

standards for e-discovery

High standardization priorities on:

- SaaS application specific data and 

metadata format standards to support 

interoperability and portability 

requirement when migrating highvalue, low-risk applications to SaaS 

(Section 9.2.3).

SaaS Self-Service Management Interfaces 

(Section 9.1.2), e.g.,

- Interface standards related to user 

account and credential management

Not a high standardization priority at this 

time

PaaS Functional Interfaces (Section 9.1.3), 

e.g.,

- Standards of data format to support 

database serialization and deserialization

Not a high standardization priority at this 

time

Business Support, Provisioning and 

Configuration (Section 9.1.4), e.g.,

- Standards for describing cloud servicelevel agreement and quality of services

- Standards for describing and 

discovering cloud service resources

- Standards for metering and billing of 

service consumptions and usage

High standardization priorities on:

- Resource description and discovery 

standards to support data center 

consolidation using private and 

community IaaS cloud systems 

(Section 9.2.4)
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Area of Standardization Gaps High Priorities for Standardization Based 

On USG Requirements

Security (Section 9.1.5), e.g.,

- Standards for identity provisioning and 

management across different network 

and administration domains

- Standards for secure and efficient 

replication of identity and access policy 

information across systems

- Single Sign-On interface and protocol 

standards that support strong 

authentication

- Standards in policies, processes, and 

technical controls in supporting the 

security auditing, regulation, and law 

compliance needs

High standardization priorities on:

- Security auditing and compliance 

standards to support secure 

deployment, assess, and accreditation 

process for cloud-specific 

deployment (Section 9.2.1)

- Identity and access management 

standards to support secure 

integration of cloud systems into 

existing enterprise security 

infrastructure (Section 9.2.2)

Accessibility (Section 9.1.6), e.g.

- Standardized “framework” for exchanging 

an individual’s accessibility requirements

Not a high standardization priority at this 

time

Table 17 – Areas of Standardization Gaps and Standardization Priorities
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10 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

10.1 CONCLUSIONS

Cloud computing can enable USG agencies to achieve cost savings and increased ability to quickly 

create and deploy enterprise applications. While cloud computing technology challenges many 

traditional approaches to data center and enterprise application design and management, 

requirements for accessibility, interoperability, performance, portability, and security remain 

critically important for successful deployments. Technically sound and timely standards are 

instrumental to ensuring that requirements for interoperability, portability, and security are met.

There is a fast-changing landscape of cloud computing-relevant standardization under way in a 

number of SDOs. While there are only a few approved cloud computing-specific standards at 

present, USG agencies should be encouraged to participate in specific cloud computing standards 

development projects that support their priorities in cloud computing services.

10.2 RECOMMEDATION TO USG AGENCIES TO HELP ACCELERATE THE 

DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF CLOUD COMPUTING STANDARDS

USG laws and policies encourage federal agency participation in the development and use of 

voluntary consensus standards and in conformity assessment activities. The following 

recommendations provide further guidance on how agencies can help to accelerate the development 

and use of cloud computing standards.

Recommendation 1 – Contribute Agency Requirements

Agencies should coordinate and contribute clear and comprehensive user requirements for cloud 

computing standards projects.

Recommendation 2 – Participate in Standards Development 

Agencies should actively participate and coordinate in cloud computing standards development 

projects that are of high priority to their agency missions. The January 17, 2012, White House 

Memorandum, M-12-08, lists five fundamental strategic objectives for federal government agencies 

whenever engaging in standards development:

• Produce timely, effective standards and efficient conformity assessment schemes that are 

essential to addressing an identified need; 

• Achieve cost-efficient, timely, and effective solutions to legitimate regulatory, procurement, 

and policy objectives; 
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• Promote standards and standardization systems that promote and sustain innovation and 

foster competition;

• Enhance U.S. growth and competitiveness and ensure non-discrimination, consistent with 

international obligations; and 

• Facilitate international trade and avoid the creation of unnecessary obstacles to trade. 

Recommendation 3 – Encourage Testing to Accelerate Technically Sound Standards-Based 

Deployments

Agencies should support the concurrent development of conformity and interoperability assessment 

schemes to accelerate the development and use of technically sound cloud computing standards and 

standards-based products, processes, and services. Agencies should also include consideration of 

conformity assessment approaches currently in place that take account of elements from 

international systems, to minimize duplicative testing and encourage private sector support.

Recommendation 4 – Specify Cloud Computing Standards

Agencies should specify cloud computing standards in their procurements and grant guidance when 

multiple vendors offer standards-based implementations and there is evidence of successful 

interoperability testing. 

Recommendation 5 – USG-Wide Use of Cloud Computing Standards

To support USG requirements for accessibility, interoperability, performance, portability, and 

security in cloud computing, the Federal Cloud Computing Standards and Technology Working 

Group, in coordination with the Federal CIO Council Cloud Computing Executive Steering 

Committee (CCESC) and the Cloud First Task Force, should recommend specific cloud computing 

standards and best practices for USG-wide use.
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11 BIBLIOGRAPHY

This section provides sources for additional information.

Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF)

• Interoperable Clouds White Paper

DSP-IS0101 Cloud Interoperability White Paper V1.0.0 

This white paper describes a snapshot of the work being done in the DMTF Open Cloud Standards 

Incubator, including use cases and reference architecture as they relate to the interfaces between a 

cloud service provider and a cloud service consumer. 

http://dmtf.org/sites/default/files/standards/documents/DSP-IS0101_1.0.0.pdf

• Architecture for Managing Clouds White Paper

DSP-IS0102 Architecture for Managing Clouds White Paper V1.0.0 

This white paper is one of two Phase 2 deliverables from the DMTF Cloud Incubator and describes 

the reference architecture as it relates to the interfaces between a cloud service provider and a cloud 

service consumer. The goal of the Incubator is to define a set of architectural semantics that unify 

the interoperable management of enterprise and cloud computing.

http://dmtf.org/sites/default/files/standards/documents/DSP-IS0102_1.0.0.pdf

• Use Cases and Interactions for Managing Clouds White Paper

DSP-IS0103 Use Cases and Interactions for Managing Clouds White Paper V1.0.0 

This document is one of two documents that together describe how standardized interfaces and data 

formats can be used to manage clouds. The document focuses on use cases, interactions, and data 

formats. http://dmtf.org/sites/default/files/standards/documents/DSP-IS0103_1.0.0.pdf

Global Inter-Cloud Technology Forum (GICTF)

Use Cases and Functional Requirements for Inter-Cloud Computing

Published on August 2010

http://www.gictf.jp/doc/GICTF_Whitepaper_20100809.pdf

This white paper describes three areas of advantages of inter-cloud computing, which are assured or 

prioritized performance, availability, and convenience of combined services. Several use cases of 

inter-cloud computing are provided with details according to these three areas, such as assured 

performance against transient overload, disaster recovery and service continuity for availability, and 

federated service provisions, followed by sequential procedures and functional requirements for 

each use case. Essential functional entities and interfaces are identified to meet these described 

requirements.
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Technical Requirements for Supporting the Intercloud Networking

Published on April 2012

http://www.gictf.jp/doc/GICTF_NWSWG-WhitePaper_e_20120420.pdf

Based on the preceding Inter-Cloud use cases and functional requirements, this white paper 

describes technical requirements for each use case such as assured service level, disaster recovery, 

service continuity, and federated service provisions.

It also shows expected technical evolutions in a next few years.

TM Forum

Cloud Monetization Differentiating Cloud Services

Released: January 2012

https://www.tmforum.org/WhitePapers/CloudMonetization/47730/article.html

This whitepaper explores the various cloud bill requirements and complexities for the different 

cloud business models. It will also explore the expectations from customers of cloud services, with 

respect to billing for cloud services, highlighting gaps and potential risks to service provider 

success, as well as recommend areas for further action.
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12 APPENDIX A – NIST FEDERAL INFORMATION PROCESSING STANDARDS 

AND SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS RELEVANT TO CLOUD COMPUTING

Federal Information Process Standards Publication (FIPS) 199, Standards for Security 

Categorization of Federal Information and Information Systems

Federal Information Processing Standards Publication (FIPS) 200, Minimum Security Requirements 

for Federal Information and Information Systems

NIST Special Publication 500-292, NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture, September

2011

NIST Special Publication 500-293, U.S. Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap, 

Release 1.0 (Draft), Volume I High-Priority Requirements to Further USG Agency Cloud 

Computing Adoption, November 2011

NIST Special Publication 500-293, U.S. Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap, 

Release 1.0 (Draft), Volume II Useful Information for Cloud Adopters, November 2011

NIST Special Publication 800-37 Rev.1, Guide for Applying the Risk Management Framework to 

Federal Information Systems: A Security Life Cycle Approach

NIST Special Publication 800-53 Rev.4, Security and Privacy Controls for Federal Information 

Systems and Organizations

NIST Special Publication 800-53 Rev.3, Recommended Security Controls for Federal Information 

Systems and Organizations

NIST Special Publication 800-92, Guide to Computer Security Log Management

NIST Special Publication 800-125, Guide to Security for Full Virtualization Technologies 

NIST Special Publication 800-137, Information Security Continuous Monitoring for Federal 

Information Systems and Organizations

NIST Special Publication 800-144, Guidelines on Security and Privacy Issues in Public Cloud 

Computing 

NIST Special Publication 800-145, The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing

NIST Special Publication 800-146, Cloud Computing Synopsis and Recommendations
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13 APPENDIX B – DEFINITIONS

Accreditation - Third-party attestation related to a conformity assessment body conveying formal

demonstration of its competence to carry out specific conformity assessment tasks [SOURCE: 

ISO/IEC 17000:2004, Conformity assessment — Vocabulary and general principles]

Accessibility

– Measurable characteristics that indicate the degree to which a system is available to, and usable 

by, individuals with disabilities. The most common disabilities include those associated with vision, 

hearing, and mobility, as well as cognitive disabilities. 

[SOURCE: This report]

– Usability of a product, service, environment or facility by individuals with the widest range of 

capabilities

NOTE 1 issues.

Although "accessibility" typically addresses users who have a disability, the concept is not limited 

to disability.

NOTE 2 Adapted from ISO/TS 16071:2003, Ergonomics of human-system interaction -- Guidance 

on accessibility for human-computer interfaces

[SOURCE: ISO/IEC 24751-1:2008, Information technology -- Individualized adaptability and 

accessibility in e-learning, education and training -- Part 1: Framework and reference model]

Attestation – Issue of a statement, based on a decision following review that fulfillment of 

specified requirements has been demonstrated

[SOURCE: ISO/IEC 17000:2004, Conformity assessment — Vocabulary and general principles]

Certification – Third-party attestation related to products, processes, systems or persons.

NOTE 1 Certification of a management system is sometimes also called registration.

NOTE 2 Certification is applicable to all objects of conformity assessment except for conformity 

assessment bodies themselves, to which accreditation is applicable.

[SOURCE: ISO/IEC 17000:2004, Conformity assessment — Vocabulary and general principles]

Conformity assessment – Demonstration that specified requirements relating to a product process, 

system, person or body are fulfilled [ISO/IEC 17000:2004, Conformity assessment — Vocabulary 

and general principles]

[SOURCE: Guidance on Federal Conformity Assessment Activities 

http://gsi.nist.gov/global/index.cfm/L1-5/L2-45/A-332]

[SOURCE: The ABC’s of the U.S. Conformity Assessment System 

http://gsi.nist.gov/global/index.cfm/L1-5/L2-45/A-337]

First-party conformity assessment activity – Conformity assessment activity that is performed by 

the person or organization that provides the object

NOTE: The first-, second- and third-party descriptors used to characterize conformity assessment 

activities with respect to a given object are not to be confused with the legal identification of the 

relevant parties to a contract.

[SOURCE: ISO/IEC 17000:2004, Conformity assessment — Vocabulary and general principles]
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Data Migration – The periodic transfer of data from one hardware or software configuration to 

another or from one generation of computer technology to a subsequent generation. Migration is a 

necessary action for retaining the integrity of the data and for allowing users to search, retrieve, and 

make use of data in the face of constantly changing technology.

[SOURCE : http ://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~scisco/lis389c.5/email/gloss.html]

Information Technologies (IT) – Encompasses all technologies for the capture, storage, retrieval, 

processing, display, representation, organization, management, security, transfer, and interchange of 

data and information. 

[SOURCE: This report]

Interoperability – The capabilities to communicate, execute programs, or transfer data among 

various functional units under specified conditions. 

[SOURCE: American National Standard Dictionary of Information Technology (ANSDIT)]

Maintainability – A measure of the ease with which maintenance of a functional unit can be 

performed using prescribed procedures and resources. Synonymous with serviceability. [SOURCE: 

American National Standard Dictionary of Information Technology (ANSDIT)]

Network Resilience – A computing infrastructure that provides continuous business operation (i.e., 

highly resistant to disruption and able to operate in a degraded mode if damaged), rapid recovery if 

failure does occur, and the ability to scale to meet rapid or unpredictable demands.

[SOURCE: The Committee on National Security Systems Instruction No 4009,"National 

Information Assurance Glossary.” CNSSI-4009]

Performance – The ability to track service and resource usage levels and to provide feedback on 

the responsiveness and reliability of the network. 

[SOURCE: ETSI and 3GPP Dictionary]

Portability – The capability of a program to be executed on various types of data processing 

systems with little or no modification and without converting the program to a different language. 

[SOURCE: American National Standard Dictionary of Information Technology (ANSDIT)]

– 1) The ability to transfer data from one system to another without being required to recreate or 

reenter data descriptions or to modify significantly the application being transported. 

– 2) The ability of software or of a system to run on more than one type or size of computer under 

more than one operating system.

[SOURCE: Federal Standard 1037C, Glossary of Telecommunication Terms, 1996]

Privacy – Information privacy is the assured, proper, and consistent collection, processing, 

communication, use, and disposition of personal information (PI) and personally identifiable 

information (PII) throughout its life cycle.

[SOURCE: NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture and Taxonomy Working Group]
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Reference implementation – An implementation of a standard to be used as a definitive 

interpretation for the requirements in that standard. Reference implementations can serve many 

purposes. They can be used to verify that the standard is implementable, validate conformance test 

tools, and support interoperability testing among other implementations. A reference 

implementation may or may not have the quality of a commercial product or service that 

implements the standard.

[SOURCE: This report]

Reliability – A measure of the ability of a functional unit to perform a required function under 

given conditions for a given time interval. 

[SOURCE: American National Standard Dictionary of Information Technology (ANSDIT)]

A time server / time service provides accurate and reliable network time where various vendor’s 

products are calibrated to NIST's Time Server / Time Service, for example in wide area computing 

TIME sharing, metrics and metering of computational node, cloud center traversals using industry 

standard groups protocols such as IEEE C37.118, IEC 61850, and IEEE 802.1AG for execution 

management, governance of execution run time where a reference time stamp marks the scheduling,

e.g., start, stop and time to live of a run time service or distributed algorithm.

Resilience 

– The ability to reduce the magnitude and/or duration of disruptive events to critical infrastructure. 

The effectiveness of a resilient infrastructure or enterprise depends upon its ability to anticipate, 

absorb, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from a potentially disruptive event. [SOURCE: Critical 

Infrastructure Resilience Final Report and Recommendations, National Infrastructure Advisory 

Council, September 8, 2009]

– The adaptive capability of an organization in a complex and changing environment. 

[SOURCE: ASIS International, ASIS SPC.1-2009, American National Standard, Organizational 

Resilience: Security, Preparedness, and Continuity Management System – Requirements with 

Guidance for Use.]

Risk Management – Coordinated activities to direct and control an organization with regard to risk 

ISO/IEC 27005, Information Technology – Security Techniques – Information Security Risk 

Management

Second-party conformity assessment activity – Conformity assessment activity that is performed 

by a person or organization that has a user interest in the object

[ISO/IEC 17000:2004, Conformity assessment — Vocabulary and general principles]
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Security – Refers to information security. Information security means protecting information and 

information systems from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or 

destruction in order to provide:

• Integrity, which means guarding against improper information modification or destruction, and 

includes ensuring information non-repudiation and authenticity;

• Confidentiality, which means preserving authorized restrictions on access and disclosure, 

including means for protecting personal privacy and proprietary information; and

• Availability, which means ensuring timely and reliable access to and use of information.

[SOURCE: Title III of the E-Government Act, entitled the Federal Information Security 

Management Act of 2002 (FISMA)]

Standard 

– A document, established by consensus and approved by a recognized body that provides for 

common and repeated use, rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results, aimed at 

the achievement of the optimum degree of order in a given context. Note: Standards should be 

based on the consolidated results of science, technology, and experience, and aimed at the 

promotion of optimum community benefits. 

[SOURCE: ISO/IEC Guide 2:2004, Standardization and related activities – General Vocabulary, 

definition 3.2]

– A document that may provide the requirements for: a product, process or service; a management 

or engineering process; or a testing methodology. An example of a product standard is the multipart 

ISO/IEC 24727, Integrated circuit card programming interfaces. An example of a management 

process standard is the ISO/IEC 27000, Information security management systems, family of 

standards. An example of an engineering process standard is ISO/IEC 15288, System life cycle 

processes. An example of a testing methodology standard is the multipart ISO/IEC 19795,

Biometric Performance Testing and Reporting.

Standards Developing Organization (SDO) – Any organization that develops and approves 

standards using various methods to establish consensus among its participants. Such organizations 

may be: accredited, such as ANSI-accredited IEEE; or international treaty-based, such as the 

ITU-T; or international private sector-based, such as ISO/IEC; or an international consortium, such 

as OASIS or IETF; or a government agency. 

SOURCE: [This report]

Third-party conformity assessment activity – Conformity assessment activity that is performed 

by a person or body that is independent of the person or organization that provides the object and 

user interests in that object

[SOURCE: ISO/IEC 17000:2004, Conformity assessment — Vocabulary and general principles]

Test – Technical operation that consists of the determination of one or more characteristics of a 

given product, process or service according to a specified procedure. [ISO/IEC Guide 2:2004]

Testing – Action of carrying out one or more tests. [ISO/IEC Guide 2:2004]
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Usability – The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals 

with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use. 

[SOURCE: ISO 9241-11:1998 Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display 

terminals (VDTs) – Part 11: Guidance on usability and ISO/IEC 25062:2006 Software engineering 

– Software product Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SquaRE) – Common Industry Format 

(CIF) for usability test reports]
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14 APPENDIX C – ACRONYMS

ANSDIT American National Standard Dictionary of Information Technology

API Application Programming Interface

BOD Business Object Document

CCESC Cloud Computing Executive Steering Committee

CDMI Cloud Data Management Interface

CDN Content Delivery Network

CIMI Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface

CIO Chief Information Officer

CMWG Cloud Management Working Group 

COTS Commercial off-the-shelf

CPU Central Processing Unit

CRM Customer Relationship Management

CRUD Create-Read-Update-Delete

CSA Cloud Security Alliance 

CSIRT Computer Security Incident Response Teams 

CSW Catalog Service for the Web

DCIFed DCI Federation Working Group

DISR Defense IT Standards Registry

DMTF Distributed Management Task Force 

DoD Department of Defense (USA)

ebRIM Electronic business Registry Information Model

ebXML Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language

ERP Enterprise Resource Planning

EULA End User License Agreement

FCCI Federal Cloud Computing Initiative

FEA Federal Enterprise Architecture

FIPS Federal Information Processing Standards

GEIA Government Electronics & Information Technology Association

GICTF Global Inter-Cloud Technology Forum 

GLUE Grid Laboratory Uniform Environment

GOTS Government off-the-shelf

HTML HyperText Markup Language

HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol

ID-WSF IDentity Web Service Framework

I/O Input/Output

IaaS Infrastructure as a Service
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IEC International Electrotechnical Commission

IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers 

IETF Internet Engineering Task Force 

IODEF Incident Object Description Format 

IP Internet Protocol

ISIMC Information Security and Identity Management Committee

ISO International Organization for Standardization

ISO/IEC JTC 1 International Organization for Standardization/International 

Electrotechnical Commission Joint Technical Committee 1 Information 

Technology 

IT (ICT) Information Technology

(Note: it is often referred to as ICT [Information and Communications 

Technologies])

ITU International Telecommunication Union (The)

ITU-T ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector

J2EE Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition

JSON JavaScript Object Notation

KMIP Key Management Interoperability Protocol 

LDAP Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

MID Mobile Internet Devices (USA)

MIL-STDS Military Standards (USA)

NIEM National Information Exchange Model 

NIST National Institute of Standards and Technology

NIST SP NIST Special Publication

OAGi Open Applications Group 

OAGIS Open Applications Group Integration Specification

OASIS Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards 

OAuth Open Authorization Protocol

OCC Open Cloud Consortium

OCCI Open Cloud Computing Interface

ODF Open Document Format

OGC Open Geospatial Consortium

OGF Open Grid Forum 

OGSA Open Grid Services Architecture

OMG Object Management Group 

OOXML Office Open XML

OS Operating System

OVF Open Virtualization Format
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P2P Peer-to-Peer

PaaS Platform as a Service

PDA Personal Digital Assistant

PHP PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

PI Personal Information

PII Personal Identifiable Information

PIV Personal Identity Verification

PKI Public Key Infrastructure

QoS Quality of Service

RDF Resource Description Framework

REST Representational State Transfer

RSS Really Simple Syndication

SaaS Software as a Service

SAJACC Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart Adoption of Cloud Computing

SAML Security Assertion Markup Language 

SCAP Security Content Automation Protocol

SDOs Standards Developing Organizations 

SLA Service Level Agreement

SNIA Storage Networking Industry Association

SOA Service-Oriented Architecture

SOAP Simple Object Access Protocol

SPML Service Provisioning Markup Language 

SSL Secure Sockets Layer 

SSO Standard Setting Organization

STANAGS Standardization Agreements

TCG Trusted Computing Group 

TCP Transmission Control Protocol

TLS Transport Layer Security

UDDI Universal Description Discovery and Integration

USG United States Government

VM Virtual Machine

W3C World Wide Web Consortium 

WG Working Group

XACML OASIS eXtensible Access Control Markup Language

XML Extensible Markup Language
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15 APPENDIX D – STANDARDS DEVELOPING ORGANIZATIONS

Global Information and Communications Technologies (IT) standards are developed in many 

venues. Such standards are created through collaborative efforts that have a global reach, are 

voluntary, and are widely adopted by the marketplace across national borders. These standards are 

developed not only by national member-based international standards bodies, but also by consortia 

groups and other organizations. 

In July 2009, a Wiki site for cloud computing standards coordination was established: cloudstandards.org. The goal of the site is to document the activities of the various SDOs working on 

cloud computing standards.

The following is a list of SDOs that have standards projects and standards relevant to cloud 

computing.

ATIS

ATIS is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). ATIS is the North 

American Organizational Partner for the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a founding 

Partner of oneM2M, a member and major U.S. contributor to the International Telecommunication 

Union (ITU) Radio and Telecommunications sectors, and a member of the Inter-American 

Telecommunication Commission (CITEL).

The ATIS Cloud Services Forum (CSF) facilitates the adoption and advancement of cloud services 

from a network and IT perspective. Drawing upon business use cases that leverage cloud services’ 

potential, the Forum addresses industry priorities and develops implementable solutions for this 

evolving marketplace. CSF is working to ensure that cloud services – as offered by service 

providers – are quickly operationalized to facilitate the delivery of interoperable, secure, and 

managed services. Current priorities include inter-carrier telepresence, content distribution network 

interconnection, cloud services framework, virtual desktop, virtual private network, and 

development of a cloud services checklist for onboarding.

CloudAudit

CloudAudit (A6), a working group under the auspices of the CSA (Cloud Security Alliance). 

Founded in January 2010, CloudAudit aims to enable cloud service providers to offer their clients 

some degree of transparency in an automated, programmatic manner. The group addresses the 

challenges of lack of transparency and audit requirements in a cloud-based system. The official 

objective of this working group is to develop a common interface for the automation of the Audit, 

Assertion, Assessment and Assurance of IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a 

service) and SaaS (software as a service) environments. As of October 2010, CloudAudit is 

officially under the auspices of the Cloud Security Alliance. 
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Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF)

DMTF spans the industry with 160 member companies and organizations, and more than 4,000 

active participants crossing 43 countries. DMTF members collaborate to develop IT management 

standards that promote multi-vendor interoperability worldwide.

Open Virtualization Format (OVF)

Open Virtualization Format (OVF) V1.0

OVF 1.1 has been designated as ANSI INCITS 469 2010, and ISO/IEC 17203: 2011.

Open Virtualization Format (OVF), OVF 2.0

This specification describes an open, secure, portable, efficient, and extensible format for the 

packaging and distribution of software to be run in virtual machines. OVF 2.0 includes support for 

network configuration along with the ability to encrypt the package to ensure safe delivery.

Open Virtualization Format (OVF)

DSP0243 Open Virtualization Format (OVF) V1.1.0 

OVF has been designated as ANSI INCITS 469 2010, ISO/IEC 17203:2011.

This specification describes an open, secure, portable, efficient, and extensible format for the 

packaging and distribution of software to be run in virtual machines. 

Open Cloud Standards Incubator

DMTF’s Open Cloud Standards Incubator focused on standardizing interactions between cloud 

systems by developing cloud management use cases, architectures, and interactions. This work was 

completed in July 2010. The work has now transitioned to the Cloud Management Working Group. 

Cloud Management Working Group (CMWG)

The CMWG will develop a set of prescriptive specifications that deliver architectural semantics as 

well as implementation details to achieve interoperable management of clouds between service 

requestors/developers and providers. This WG will propose a resource model that, at a minimum, 

captures the key artifacts identified in the use cases and interactions for managing clouds document 

produced by the Open Cloud Incubator. This group has developed and released the Cloud 

Infrastructure Management Inter Face (CIMI).

Using the recommendations developed by DMTF's Open Cloud Standards Incubator, the Cloud 

Management Workgroup (CMWG) is focused on standardizing interactions between cloud systems 

by developing specifications that deliver architectural semantics and implementation details to 

achieve interoperable cloud management between service providers and their consumers and 

developers.
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Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 

The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA), a globally recognized standards-setting body within 

the IEEE, develops consensus standards through an open process that engages industry and brings 

together a broad stakeholder community. IEEE standards set specifications and best practices based 

on current scientific and technological knowledge. The IEEE-SA has a portfolio of over 900 active 

standards and more than 500 standards under development.

The IEEE P2301 Working Group (Cloud Profiles) is developing the Guide for Cloud Portability and 

Interoperability Profiles (CPIP). The guide advises cloud computing ecosystem participants (cloud 

vendors, service providers, and users) of standards-based choices in areas such as application 

interfaces, portability interfaces, management interfaces, interoperability interfaces, file formats, 

and operation conventions.

The EEE P2302 Working Group (Intercloud) is developing the Standard for Intercloud 

Interoperability and Federation (SIIF). This standard defines topology, functions, and governance 

for cloud-to-cloud interoperability and federation.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) issues the standards and protocols used to protect the 

Internet and enable global electronic commerce. The IETF develops cyber security standards for the 

Internet. Current activities include Public Key Infrastructure Using X.509 (PKIX), Internet Protocol 

Security (IPsec), Transport Layer Security (TLS), Secure Electronic Mail (S/MIME V3), DNS 

Security Extensions (DNSSEC), and Keying and Authentication for Routing Protocols (karp). 

Another IETF standard is the Incident Object Description Format (IODEF), which provides a 

framework for sharing information commonly exchanged by Computer Security Incident Response 

Teams (CSIRTs) about computer security incidents. IODEF is an underpinning for the National 

Information Exchange Model (NIEM), which enables jurisdictions to effectively share critical 

information on cyber incident management, security configuration management, security 

vulnerability management, etc. 

International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission 

Joint Technical Committee 1 Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC 1) 

ISO/IEC JTC 1 is the standards development environment where experts come together to develop 

worldwide Information and Communication Technology (ICT) standards for business and consumer 

applications. Additionally, JTC 1 provides the standards approval environment for integrating 

diverse and complex ICT technologies. These standards rely upon the core infrastructure 

technologies developed by JTC 1 centers of expertise complemented by specifications developed in 

other organizations. Presently, there are 91 country members. Approximately 2100 technical experts 

from around the world work within JTC 1. There are presently 18 JTC 1 Subcommittees (SCs) in 

which most of JTC 1 standards projects are being developed.

JTC 1 SC 27 (IT Security Techniques) is the one JTC 1 SC that is completely focused on cyber 

security standardization. There are currently three cloud security standards projects in SC27.
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ISO/IEC 4th WD 27017, Information security management - Guidelines on information security 

controls for the use of cloud computing services based on ISO/IEC 27002 (Technical Specification) 

Provides organizations using or expecting to use cloud computing services with guidelines for 

initiating, implementing, maintaining, and improving the information security management based 

upon ISO/IEC 27002:2005 specific to the cloud computing services. 

ISO/IEC 2nd WD 27018, Code of practice for data protection controls for public cloud computing 

services

Establishes commonly accepted data protection control objectives, controls, and guidelines for 

implementing controls to meet the requirements identified by a risk assessment. Applies primarily 

to organizations providing cloud computing services that act as PII processors. 

ISO/IEC 1st WD 27036-4, Information technology – Security techniques – Information security for 

supplier relationships – Part 4: Guidelines for security of cloud services 

Provides cloud service acquirers and suppliers with guidance on: managing the information security 

risks caused by using cloud services; integrating information security processes and practices into 

the cloud –based product and service life cycle processes, while supporting information security 

controls; responding to risks specific to the acquisition or provision of cloud-based services that can 

have an information security impact on organisations using these services.

In October 2009, JTC 1 established a new Subcommittee, JTC 1 SC 38 Distributed application 

platforms and services (DAPS). JTC 1 SC 38 has subsequently established Working Group 3, Cloud 

computing. 

Two Collaborative Teams have been established by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC38/WG3 and ITU-T 

SG13/WP6:

- Collaborative Team on Cloud Computing Overview and Vocabulary (CT-CCVOCAB)

- Collaborative Team on Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (CT-CCRA).

International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Telecommunication Standardization Sector 

(ITU-T)

The ITU-T develops international standards for the telecommunications including voice, data, and

video. The primary Study Groups in the ITU-T that are developing standards for cloud computing 

are SG13: Future networks including cloud computing, mobile and next-generation networks, and 

SG17: Security.

A new ITU-T Working Party in Study Group 13 (i.e., WP6/13). WP6/13 includes three new 

Questions or areas of cloud computing study. WP6/13 is currently developing a number of Draft 

Cloud Computing Recommendation and has established two Collaborative Teams with ISO/IEC 

JTC 1/SC38. See the JTC 1 SC 38 WG 3 above.
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Kantara Initiative

Kantara Initiative was established on April 20, 2009, by leaders of several foundations and 

associations working on various aspects of digital identity, aka “the Venn of Identity.” It is intended 

to be a robust and well-funded focal point for collaboration to address the issues shared across the 

identity community: Interoperability and Compliance Testing; Identity Assurance; Policy and Legal 

Issues; Privacy; Ownership and Liability; UX and Usability; Cross-Community Coordination and 

Collaboration; Education and Outreach; Market Research; Use Cases and Requirements; 

Harmonization; and Tool Development.

Kantara Initiative is not a standards setting organization for technical specifications. The output of 

Kantara Initiative is called a Recommendation. Any kind of work can be done in Kantara Initiative 

but if the work is a technical specification it must be submitted to a standards setting organization 

upon completion. Other “standards” work such as Operational Frameworks or Usability Guidelines 

or Interoperability Testing Procedures are the primary focus of Kantara Initiative and will be both 

developed and maintained by the organization.

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards)

Founded in 1993, OASIS is a not-for-profit consortium. OASIS develops open standards for the 

global information society. The consortium produces Eeb services standards along with standards 

for security, e-business, and standardization efforts in the public sector and for application-specific 

markets. OASIS has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and 

individual members in 100 countries.

Technical Committees specific to cloud computing include:

Cloud Application Management for Platforms (CAMP) – The purpose of this TC is to define 

models, mechanisms, and protocols for the management of applications in, and their use of, a 

Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment.

Cloud Authorization (CloudAuthZ) – The focus of this TC is to develop an interoperable protocol 

for PaaS (self-service) management interfaces for cloud users to use in developing, deploying and 

administration of their applications. PaaS management should allow for, but not require, IaaS 

management to manage the deployment of resources for an application. 

Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) – The TC was formed 

in December, 2011, with the goal to substantially enhance the portability of cloud applications and 

the IT services that comprise them running on complex virtual and physical software and hardware 

infrastructure.”
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The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) 

OCC is a member-driven organization that develops reference implementations, benchmarks, and 

standards for cloud computing. The OCC operates cloud testbeds, such as the Open Cloud Testbed 

and the OCC Virtual Network Testbed. The OCC also manages cloud computing infrastructure to 

support scientific research, such as the Open Science Data Cloud.

Open Grid Forum (OGF)

Open Grid Forum (OGF) is a leading standards developing organization operating in the areas of 

grid, cloud, and related forms of advanced distributed computing. The OGF community pursues 

these topics through an open process for development, creation, and promotion of relevant 

specifications and use cases.

OGF engages partners and participants throughout the international arena to champion architectural 

blueprints related to cloud and grid computing and the associated specifications to enable the 

pervasive adoption of advanced distributed computing techniques for business and research 

worldwide. 

Advanced computing built on OGF standards enables organizations to share computing and 

information resources across department and organizational boundaries in a secure, efficient 

manner. Organizations throughout the world use production distributed architectures built on these 

features to collaborate in areas as diverse as scientific research, drug discovery, financial risk 

analysis, and product design. The capacity and flexibility of distributed computing enables 

organizations to solve problems that until recently were not feasible to address due to 

interoperability, portability, security, cost and data-integration constraints. 

Cloud systems, grids, and virtualized distributed architectures reduce costs through automation and 

improved IT resource utilization and improve organizational agility by enabling more efficient 

business processes. OGF’s extensive experience has enabled distributed computing built on these 

architectures to become a more flexible, efficient, and utility-like global computing infrastructure.

Standardization is the key to realizing the full vision and benefits of distributed computing. The 

standards developed by OGF enable the diverse resources of today’s modern computing 

environment to be discovered, accessed, allocated, monitored, and managed as interconnected 

flexible virtual systems, even when provided by different vendors and/or operated by different 

organizations.

Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) Working Group

The purpose of this group is the creation of a practical solution to interface with cloud 

infrastructures exposed as a service (IaaS). The Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) is a 

RESTful Protocol and API for all kinds of cloud management tasks. OCCI was originally initiated 

to create a remote management API for IaaS model-based services, allowing for the development of 

interoperable tools for common tasks including deployment, autonomic scaling, and monitoring. It 

has since evolved into a flexible API with a strong focus on interoperability while still offering a 
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high degree of extensibility. The current release of the Open Cloud Computing Interface is suitable 

to serve many other models in addition to IaaS, including PaaS and SaaS.

Object Management Group (OMG)

The OMG was founded in 1989 and develops standards for enterprise integration. Its membership is 

international and is open to any organization, both computer industry vendors and software end 

users. Specific cloud-related specification efforts have only just begun in OMG, focusing on 

modeling deployment of applications and services on clouds for portability, interoperability, and 

reuse.

Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA)

SNIA Cloud TWG

The SNIA has created the Cloud Storage Technical Work Group for the purpose of developing 

SNIA Architecture related to system implementations of cloud storage technology. The cloud 

Storage TWG: 

- Acts as the primary technical entity for the SNIA to identify, develop, and coordinate 

systems standards for cloud storage;

- Produces a comprehensive set of specifications and drives consistency of interface standards 

and messages across the various cloud storage-related efforts; and

- Documents system-level requirements and shares these with other cloud storage standards 

organizations under the guidance of the SNIA Technical Council and in cooperation with the 

SNIA Strategic Alliances Committee.

SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI)

The CDMI specification is now a SNIA Architecture standard and has been submitted to the 

INCITS organization for ratification as an ANSI and ISO standard as well. 

SNIA Terms and Diagrams

SNIA and OGF have collaborated on cloud storage for a cloud computing white paper. A demo of 

this architecture has been implemented and shown several times. More information can be found at 

the Cloud Demo Google Group. 

Trusted Computing Group (TCG)

The TCG is a not-for-profit organization formed to develop, define, and promote open, vendorneutral industry standards for trusted computing building blocks and software interfaces across 

multiple platforms. TCG has approximately 100 members from across the computing industry, 

including component vendors, software developers, systems vendors, and network and 

infrastructure companies.
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Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA)

The TIA is accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as a standards 

developing organization (SDO). TIA has created the Cloud Computing Subcommittee (CCSC). 

Acting as a liaison between TIA’s twelve engineering committees, the CCSC hosts monthly calls 

open to TIA member companies and engineering committee participants. The focus of these calls is 

to address ways TIA engineering committees may develop or amend TIA standards pertaining to 

cloud services. The CCSC also maintains liaison relationships with national and international 

standards development organizations (SDOs) to determine how existing TIA standards may be 

adopted to avoid duplication of efforts

TM Forum

TM Forum is a global, non-profit industry association focused on enabling service provider agility 

and innovation. As an established thought-leader in service creation, management and delivery, the 

Forum serves as a unifying force across industries, enabling more than 900 member companies to 

solve critical business issues through access to a wealth of knowledge, intellectual capital and 

standards.

The Forum provides a unique, fair, and safe environment for the entire value-chain to collaborate 

and overcome the barriers to a vibrant, open digital economy, helping member companies of all 

sizes gain a competitive edge by enabling efficiency and agility in their IT and operations.

TM Forum’s Digital Services Initiative focuses on overcoming the end-to-end management 

challenges of complex digital services, enabling an open, vibrant digital economy. The Forum's 

work in cloud is targeted at solving the challenges faced by members as they deliver and consume 

digital services hosted in the cloud.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Founded in 1994, the W3C is a non-incorporated international community of 334 Member 

organizations that develop standards in support of web technologies. The W3C work in the area of 

cyber security standards includes secure transferring data from one domain to another domain or 

between applications with well-defined document authentication. XML Encryption and XML 

Signature are key pieces of the XML security stack.
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16 APPENDIX E – CONCEPTUAL MODELS AND ARCHITECTURES

General reference models: 

• Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF): Cloud Service Reference Architecture 

• Cloud Computing Use Case Discussion Group: a taxonomy for cloud computing 

• IBM: Cloud Reference Architecture 

• Cloud Security Alliance: Cloud Reference Model 

• Cisco Cloud Reference Architecture Framework 

• IETF: Cloud Reference Framework 

• ITU-T Focus Group Cloud Reference Architecture

Reference models focusing on specific application requirements:

• Open Security Architecture: Secure Architecture Models 

• GSA: FCCI (Federal Cloud Computing Initiative) 

• Juniper Networks: Cloud-ready Data Center Reference Architecture 

• SNIA standard: Cloud Data Management Interface 

• Elastra: A Cloud Technology Reference Model for Enterprise Clouds
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17 APPENDIX F – EXAMPLES OF USG CRITERIA FOR SELECTION OF 

STANDARDS

USG Approach to Selecting Standards

F-1 Analysis Model for Selection of Private Sector Consensus Standards26

NIST has developed a model set of questions to use when evaluating private sector consensus 

standards for agency use:

Applicability of standard 

• Is it clear who should use the standard and for what applications?

• How does the standard fit into the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA)?

• What was done to investigate viable alternative standards (i.e., due diligence) before 

selecting this standard?

Availability of standard 

• Is the standard published and publicly available?

• Is a copy of the standard free or must it be purchased?

• Are there any licensing requirements for using the standard?

Completeness of standard 

• To what degree does the candidate standard define and cover the key features necessary to 

support the specific E-Gov functional area or service?

Implementations on standard 

• Does the standard have strong support in the commercial marketplace?

• What commercial products exist for this standard?

• Are there products from different vendors in the market to implement this standard?

• Are there any existing or planned mechanisms to assess conformity of implementations to 

the standard?

 

26 http://www.nist.gov/standardsgov/analysis-model-for-selection-of-consensus-standards.cfm
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Interoperability of implementations 

• How does this standard provide users the ability to access applications and services through 

web services?

• What are the existing or planned mechanisms to assess the interoperability of different 

vendor implementations?

Legal considerations 

• Are there any patent assertions made to this standard?

• Are there any Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) assertions that will hinder USG distribution 

of the standard?

Maturity of standard 

• How technically mature is the standard? 

• Is the underlying technology of the standard well-understood (e.g., a reference model is 

well-defined, appropriate concepts of the technology are in widespread use, the technology 

may have been in use for many years, a formal mathematical model is defined, etc.)?

• Is the standard based upon technology that has not been well-defined and may be relatively 

new?

Source of standard 

• What standards body developed and now maintains this standard?

• Is this standard a de jure or de facto national or international standard?

• Is there an open process for revising or amending this standard?

Stability of standard 

• How long has this standard been used?

• Is the standard stable (e.g., its technical content is mature)? 

• Are major revisions or amendments in progress that will affect backward compatibility with 

the approved standard? 

• When is the estimated completion date for the next version?
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F-2 Department of Defense (DoD)

The DoD IT Standards Registry (DISR) mandates the minimum set of IT standards and guidelines 

for the acquisition of all DoD systems that produce, use, or exchange information. The Defense 

Information Systems Agency (DISA) is the executive agent for the DISR. The DISR is updated 

three times a year.

Initial Standards Selection Criteria for Inclusion in the DISR

A number of criteria should be considered when evaluating a standard for inclusion in the DISR. 

Selection criteria include:

• the source of the standard;

• openness; 

• technology relevance;

• maturity;

• marketplace support;

• “usefulness/utility”; and

• risk.

Criteria Description

Source of the Standard Recognized authority

Cooperative stance

Feedback

Process

Consensus

Openness Ownership/IPR

User Participation

Vendor Participation

Technology Relevance

Maturity Planning Horizon

Stability

Revision Content & Schedule

Marketplace Support Acceptance

Commercial Viability

Usefulness/Utility Well-Defined Quality Attributes

Services & Application Interoperability

Risk Performance, maturity & stability issues

Table 18 – DoD Selection Criteria and Description Summary
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Standards Source

DoD policy articulates a preference hierarchy based on the source (owner/sponsor/publisher) of the 

standard. Note that the 5th Priority, Military, has its own internal priority of international first and 

then DoD MIL-STDs.

The standards preference hierarchy is:

Priority Standards Source Hierarchy Example

1st International ISO, IEC, ITU

2nd National ANSI

3rd Professional Society; Technology Consortia; Industry 

Association

IEEE; IETF; W3C; 

OASIS; GEIA

4th Government FIPS

5th Military MIL-STDS, STANAGS

Table 19 – DoD Standards Sources Preferences

The standard must be recognized as being available from a reputable and authoritative source. The 

responsible SDO/Standard Setting Organization (SSO) must have an established position within the 

relevant technical, professional, and marketplace communities as an objective authority in its sphere 

of activity. This means that the standard has been created and approved/adopted/published via a 

formal process and configuration management of the standard has been established. Accreditation 

implies acceptance by a recognized authoritative SSO.
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The Standards Selection Criteria also provides guidance for moving through the standards life cycle 

that changes the category of a standard from “emerging” to “mandated” to “inactive/retired.”

Figure 13 – DoD DISR Standards Selection Process