The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) — whose membership roster includes large corporate entities such as BMW, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Lockheed Martin is continuing to express its vision for the future of cloud services and the impact they can have on business and industry. While this has implications for corporations such as those listed herein, there are also issues that may impact local and state governments, and their roll in the ever-evolving world of software as a service (SaaS), not to mention storage and secure transfer of data.
The advantages of public cloud services are evident to many organizations. The ODCA wants to see cloud services evolve into multi-tenant shared infrastructures that may enable greater flexibility, while ultimately lowering costs.
This past week, the organization published two new frameworks — the Software Entitlement Management Framework and the Data Security Framework — which detail what the members expect from vendors. The first framework addresses the need to move away from what the ODCA feels are outdated software licensing models based on system or CPU core-count metrics to ones that match cloud-based, on-demand services and dynamic scaling of resources, it said.
“We have an installed base, and don’t want to throw away those licenses. So we have to find ways to get the installed base of licenses to a more cloud-enabled model,” said Mario Mueller, chairman of the ODCA and vice president of IT Infrastructure at car maker BMW.
Licensing is always a hot topic, and so is security. The Data Security Framework addresses the topic from a number of different facets, including data encryption, event management and access control. How this will impact local and state government remains to be seen, but the long positioned view of these public organizations is to protect their proprietary position on software development, access, and updates to the death. In the end, it will be interesting to see where this battle progresses.
Our view is that cloud-based solutions are not the ultimate end-all perfect solution. They do, however provide organizations with the potential to do more, faster and with lower costs. To that end, our own development of a cloud-based solution for first responders continues…
