Europe must take a backseat on cloud standards, warns APM Group

As the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) prepares to thrash out a cloud standards roadmap for Europe, APM Group, the Cloud Industry Forum’s (CIF) independent certification partner, calls for a standards regime that will support SMEs as they seek to negotiate the single market.

Following on from the launch of the European Commission’s (EC) cloud strategy document last year, ETSI has been working with key stakeholders to identify "a detailed map of the necessary standards for security, interoperability, data portability and reversibility" by 2013. The interested parties will convene in Brussels on 17th April to present their findings.

According to Richard Pharro, APM Groups CEO, the standards ultimately selected must strike a balance between satisfying the needs of end users, appeasing Eurocrats, but still remaining workable for CSPs:

“A unified approach to cloud standards across Europe is, in principle, very welcome. Common standards will be key to arriving at a common framework for cloud services, encouraging end user confidence and removing any uncertainty that surrounds the industry. But many in the industry are concerned that the framework arrived at will be so heavily regulated that it will be unworkable and untenable, particularly for smaller cloud providers.
“We need to be careful not to raise the bar on standards in such a way that only the largest companies can afford to comply. If the EC is to open up the single market for smaller CSPs, its vital that they can strike a balance between services offered, standards required and the assurance regime to be complied with,” he continued.

David Terrar, member of the CIF Governance Board and CEO of D2C Limited, added: "Common standards across Europe is no doubt the right way to go, but I worry about the barrier to entry for smaller cloud players. There’s a huge amount of value and innovation coming from SME service providers and it would be a shame if they were excluded from the party because the cost of achieving the standards was beyond their budgets. That would simply play into the hands of major IT vendors. That's why I'm a big supporter of the CIF Code of Practice approach, where there is a self-certification option that keeps the costs down so even companies with fewer than a dozen employees can achieve it."

According to Pharro, rather than mandating overly prescriptive standards from the top down, the EC should look to create a template for best practice against which cloud providers can measure and improve their services:

“The need for standards in the industry is self-evident but imposing them from above would likely be the wrong approach. Rather, we would like to see the Commission develop clear guidance on operational best practice, something akin to the CIF Code of Practice, against which CSPs can certify. Unless standards are driven forward by the providers themselves, the lack of knowledge on what a good cloud actually looks like will hold businesses back. If the EU is serious about growth and innovation, it must foster an environment in which it pays for CSPs to certify, strengthen their services and ultimately reap the market rewards for their efforts.”