Standards, guidepost for healthy and sustainable development of China’s cloud computing industry

CHINA: Standards have increasingly become the core for countries to reserve strategic resources and enhance international competitiveness.

"The man who sets up standards gets the world" has been repeatedly demonstrated in the IT field, where giants like Microsoft, Apple and Qualcomm serve as good examples. Cloud computing, conforming to the worldwide demand for integrating computing resources and service capabilities, is the strategic vantage point in the current international IT competition.

Therefore, China's competitiveness in the international IT field will depend on our ability of setting up independent standards for cloud computing in the future.

In 2011, China's cloud computing industry witnessed a prosperous development. Cloud computing continued to extend from governments to enterprises and to individual users, from the IT industry to traditional agriculture and industry in addition to the modern service industry. The industrial size reached RMB 160 billion, up 63.8 percent year-on-year, and it is expected to reach RMB 800 billion in 2014.

However, risks also exist behind the prosperous development of the cloud computing industry. Due to the lack of evaluation principles and access systems, some regions which still lacks great demand for cloud computing applications may claim markets by making rash investments; the shortage of applications makes it difficult for data centers to operate at full capacity; the change of the security environment forces cloud computing to face new security situations.

Such risks have been affecting the healthy and sustainable development of China's cloud computing industry at every moment. These risks will become the blasting fuse of crises in China's cloud computing industry.

Cloud computing standards will involve infrastructures, key technologies and products, assessment, operation, security evaluation, etc., and cover basically all the components from hardware, software to business application modes.

Basic standards: Such standards, used to clarify and define the terms, definitions, demand and business scenarios of cloud computing, are some common basic standards of cloud computing, including the terminology, basic reference models and standardized guides of cloud computing.

Standards for key cloud computing technologies and products: Such standards mainly focus on issues like on-demand supply of resources, data locking, distributed management of massive data, and browsing interaction that are most concerned by users, aiming at building an interconnected, highly efficient and stable environment for cloud computing to regulate multiple layers such as the resource layer, the data layer and the application layer.

Standards for service operation management: Such standards cover general requirements for cloud services, standards for cloud-based service modes, general standards for cloud service protocols, evaluation guides on the quality of cloud services, standards for cloud O&M services, standards for cloud service auditing, standards for cloud governance and other aspects, focusing on resolving issues like required qualifications and capabilities for providing cloud computing services, as well as telemeter reading and service auditing when providing cloud computing services for users.

Besides, to ensure high-quality services, issues like the O&M services of various cloud computing platforms and data centers, service quality evaluation and service grading are also required.