Welcome to the Cloud Working Group Wiki

The OMG Cloud Working Group, formed in July 2018, is the successor to the Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC), started in 2011.

The OMG Cloud Working Group publishes vendor-neutral guidance on important considerations for cloud computing adoption – highlighting standards, opportunities for standardization, cloud customer requirements, and best practices to foster an ecosystem of open, standards-based cloud computing technologies.

The co-chairs of the Working Group are, as of March 2021:

• Claude Baudoin (Principal, cébé IT & Knowledge Management)
• David Harris (Cyber Architect, TC Engine)
• Lisa Schenkewitz (Executive IT Architect, IBM)

Co-chair roles and responsibilities are less formal in an OMG Working Group than they are in a Special Interest Group or Task Force. There are no formal policies and procedures about the organization of a WG. However, it is our intent to periodically ask CWG members to formally elect the group's co-chairs.

As of March 2021, membership in the CWG is open, free, and not restricted to holders of an OMG membership. However, co-chairs must be from an OMG member company.

The CWG largely operates through work performed “off-line” by its members, such as the writing and editing of discussion papers. In addition, “information sessions” (status review and discussion of the CWG's roadmap) are held during regular OMG meetings, usually on Wednesday mornings, and are announced on the OMG meeting agenda. See omg.org/events for the dates and locations of the next meetings.

Below is a table of reports from prior longer meetings:

• green links point to sub-pages in this wiki
• blue links point to OMG documents or Google Docs notes
• red links point to pages that do not exist yet

The CSCC created 27 guides or papers during its existence. All of those are now classified as “OMG Discussion Papers,” although they are not being re-published with a new title or cover page at this time. The change in name and branding will occur as the papers are updated. With the new papers added by the OMG Cloud Working group since 2019, there are now 29 guides or papers, listed below.

The roadmap for the writing of new Discussion Papers or the updating of existing ones will be decided by the group as a whole during its meetings. The workflow for each paper will conclude with:

• the preparation of an “external draft” for review by anyone (including non-OMG members) who cares to comment
• a four-week review period directed at the members of the appropriate OMG Task Force (for technically-oriented papers, it will be the Middleware and Related Services [MARS] Task Force)
• a short presentation of the paper, with a summary of edits made as a result of the review, to the Task Force members
• a Task Force vote to issue the papers.

In general, the last two steps will take place during an in-person Task Force meeting during an OMG Technical Meeting week. In exceptional cases, this may be replaced by an e-mail vote if the Task Force chairs agree, to avoid delaying the paper.

We generally raise the possibility of updating an existing paper or guide when it is about three years old. Major reason to update a paper may be:

• references to obsolete technologies,
• important evolution of the market,
• new opinions presented by CWG members,
• appearance of new standards.

In addition, revisions should address the following objectives:

• re-branding the paper or guide with the OMG logo, the name of the Cloud Working Group, and the OMG copyright notice,
• acknowledging authors (some older papers did not contain an acknowledgement section),
• fixing “link rot” and replacing obsolete links with newer ones,
• aligning the terminology with the most recent usage (e.g., “CSP” and “CSC” for cloud service providers and customers, respectively),
• tightening the language when there are repetitions or unnecessary statements,
• fixing any typos or grammar errors.

When new papers are released, they may supersede similar considerations previously included in some other papers, in which case those will need to be revised accordingly in due time.

The roadmap for the next cycles (reviewed at each meeting) currently includes:

• The December 2018 meeting raised the need for a Catalog of Cloud Standards.

• Getting a document approved without too much delay if the final draft is ready a few days after an OMG meeting. The MARS Task Force agreed, during its December 2018 meeting, on the following rules. We will propose that other Task Forces that may be asked to approve other papers follow those rules too, and we will submit them as suggestions to the new Process Subcommittee of the Architecture Board.
  • Approval outside of their regular meetings should be exceptional.
  • The final draft should be distributed four weeks before the vote starts.
  • An e-mail vote will then be administered using normal OMG poll procedures.

Per OMG policies and procedures, there are now new types of deliverables that the CWG may undertake:

• RFIs when more information is required from members, users or vendors
• RFPs when the CWG wishes to solicit a new standard
• RFCs when there is an existing, uncontested technology that can become a standard

However, RFPs and RFCs can only be issued by a Technical Committee upon recommendation of a Task Force. The CWG will generally request such a recommendation from the Middleware and Related Services (MARS) Platform Task Force, but may from time to time go through another, more relevant Task Force.

Interested OMG and non-OMG participants are invited to join the CWG.

We have a mailing list, [email protected]. If you join the CWG, you will be added to the distribution. To ask to be added to the mailing list manually, or to unsubscribe, please click here, state your request in the message, and press Send.

In 2020, OMG mailing lists will become closed to non-members after a transition period. We will continue to broadcast important news on our LinkedIn group. In order to see all the information generated by the CWG, please bookmark this wiki page and visit it periodically, and consider joining OMG as a member. This will give you access to all of OMG's work, not just the CWG's.

The following people are currently able to edit this wiki directly, and more will be added as appropriate:

• Claude Baudoin (co-chair)

Others should be able to use the discussion box to suggest changes, and the authors will implement the changes or discuss them with the authors of the suggestions. If you encounter any difficulty doing so, please contact Claude Baudoin.

Also contact Claude if you wish to become an author/editor of this wiki. You will be given your own username and password to do so.

This is a list of relevant international and national standards; compliance or certification programs; and other initiatives, strategies, policies, procedures, and governance documents that should be considered when formulating positions, creating documents, or suggesting OMG standardization efforts.

In existence:

• ISO/IEC 23189, Framework for Trust in Processing for Multi-Sourced Data. This actually relates more to the OMG’s Data Governance WG than to the Cloud WG. This will be mentioned to the OMG Data Governance WG co-chairs for their consideration.
• ISO/IEC 22624, Taxonomy-Based Data Handling for Cloud Services.
• ISO/IEC 22678, Guidance for Policy Development

In progress:

• ISO/IEC 23167, Common Technologies and Concepts
• ISO/IEC 23187, Interacting with Cloud Services Partners
• ISO/IEC 23188, Edge Computing Landscape. This is coordinated with SC 41 (IoT), whose Working Group 3 (IoT Architecture) is led by Erin Bournival (Dell) who also co-chairs the Standards Task Group (STG) of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). This is more relevant to the IIC than to the OMG, but since Claude Baudoin participates in the IIC STG meetings, he can discuss the connection to the cloud with Erin.
• ISO/IEC 23613, Service Metering and Billing.

ANSI X9 (Accredited Standards Committee on Financial Services) has been preparing, since mid-2020, a new standard called X9.125 on cloud security and cryptography for financial institutions. Claude Baudoin is a member of the authoring team and has ensured that input provided by several members of OMG's Cloud WG was incorporated into the standard. The development was completed in Q3 2023.

• Federal Cloud Computing Strategy (draft)
• Cloud Acquisition Professional’s Cloud Adoption Survival Tips, Lessons, and Experiences (CASTLE) Guide
• Cloud Ethics Opinions Around the U.S. (a compilation from the American Bar Association about the criteria that are used to determine that lawyers can ethically use cloud computing in their practice)
• U.S. Department of Defense Cloud Acquisition Guidebook

(under construction, in part by collecting references from the existing CSCC guides and white papers, or those sent by members of this group)

Help us populate this section by sending event listings to the CWG co-chairs. If you attend an event, please take notes and transform them into a subpage of this wiki (we'll explain how – see Section 5.2).

Di Martino, Beniamino, Giuseppina Cretalla, and Antonio Esposito: Cloud Portability and Interoperability. Springer Briefs in Computer Science, 2019. ISBN 978-3-319-13701-8.

International Organization for Standards (ISO): ISO/IEC 19944-1:2020 Cloud computing and distributed platforms ─ Data flow, data categories and data use - Part 1: Fundamentals (for purchase)

Lawson, Angela, et al.: Beyond Theory: Getting Practical With Blockchain. Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, February 2019, 27 pages.

Makhlouf, Rasha: Cloudy transaction costs: a dive into cloud computing economics. Journal of Cloud Computing, Vol. 9 (2020)