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On December 8, 2021, the IEEE Standards Association Standards Board approved the IEEE 2302-2021 Standard for Intercloud Interoperability and Federation produced by IEEE's P2302 Working Group (chaired by NIST's Robert Bohn), following the IEEE's Standards Review Committee recommended approval. 
 

The standard is also based on the NIST Special Publication 500-332 The NIST Cloud Federation Reference Architecture and NIST research.

To date, the interoperability of cloud services has been a challenge for providers and customers. Consequently, cloud services were limited in geographic coverage, functionality, and scalability. Cloud computing incompatibilities are analogous to the early days of the telephone and the Internet.

The IEEE standard represents a major advance for cloud computing – or computing on-demand – enabling greater interoperability. It defines a functional model for a cloud federation and addresses the following:

  • Topology, which defines its clouds, exchanges, and gateways
  • Functional elements, which include messaging, resource ontologies, and trust infrastructure
  • Governance elements – its registration, geo-independence, trust anchor, compliance, and audit

The intended technical benefit of the standard is to enable a dynamic infrastructure that can support evolving business models, and ultimately facilitate the growth of cloud computing.