Report: Firms Plan Alliance for Cloud Computing Standards

Technology companies with customer bases ranging from the mostly consumer (Facebook and Yahoo) to the mostly business (Citrix, Cisco) plan to join forces in the Open Networking Alliance, a group setting standards for networking and cloud computing technologies, The New York Times reports.

Broadcom, Brocade, Ciena, Dell, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Force10, Google, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Juniper, Marvell, Microsoft, NEC, Netgear, NTT, Riverbed Technology, Verizon and VMWare make up the rest of the panel, which "hopes to help standardize a set of technologies pioneered at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, and meant to make small and large networks programmable in much the same way that individual computers are," according to the article.

The Stanford-developed technologies are called OpenFlow, and they offer a number of ways to adapt increasingly large computer networks as cloud and hosted services gain popularity.

The Times continues:

…these days, when cloud computing means a lot of the information is stored and processed on computers out on the network, there is growing need for more intelligent control systems to orchestrate the behavior of thousands of routing machines. It will make it possible, for example, for managers of large networks to program their network to prioritize certain types of data, perhaps to ensure quality of service or to add security to certain portions of a network.

The designers argue that because OpenFlow should open up hardware and software systems that control the flow of Internet data packets, systems that have been closed and proprietary, it will cause a new round of innovation focused principally upon the vast computing systems known as cloud computers.

Security and privacy over these networks will be one of the major focus points of the foundation, according to the report.

Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio