Dedicated to the belief that the cloud should be open

open cloud manifesto

public.

The cloud provides an infrastructure for improving business processes. An

organization and its suppliers and partners can share data and applications in

the cloud, allowing everyone involved to focus on the business process instead

For companies that are just starting out, organizations in emerging markets, or

even “Skunk Works” groups in larger organizations, cloud computing greatly

reduces startup costs. The new organization starts with an infrastructure

already in place, so the time and other resources that would be spent on

building a data center are borne by the cloud provider, whether the cloud is

private or public. 

Challenges and Barriers to

Although the cloud presents tremendous opportunity and value for organizations,

the usual IT requirements (security, integration, and so forth) still apply. In

addition, some new issues come about because of the multi-tenant nature

(information from multiple companies may reside on the same physical hardware)

of cloud computing, the merger of applications and data, and the fact that a

company’s workloads might reside outside of their physical on-premise

datacenter. This section examines five main challenges that cloud computing must

Many organizations are uncomfortable with the idea of storing their data and

applications on systems they do not control. Migrating workloads to a shared

infrastructure increases the potential for unauthorized access and exposure.

Consistency around authentication, identity management, compliance, and

access technologies will become increasingly important. To reassure their

customers, cloud providers must offer a high degree of transparency into their

It is important that both data and applications systems expose standard