Cloud Working Group

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, until the September 2019 meeting, are:

• Claude Baudoin (Principal, cébé IT & Knowledge Management)
• David Harris (Supply Chain Cyber Security, The Boeing Company)
• Karolyn Schalk (Client Success Manager, IBM Hybrid Cloud SaaS; IBM Certified Cloud Solutions Architect)

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 that after the first year, the CWG will formally elect its co-chairs. Lisa Schenkewitz (IBM) has volunteered to alternate with Karolyn Schalk and take one of the co-chair seats in the summer of 2019.

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, status reviews and discussions of the CWG's roadmap will occur during regular OMG meetings. The initial cadence of meetings, agreed at the 25 Sep 2018 kickoff meeting in Ottawa, is:

• a face-to-face meeting (half a day or a full day) during the quarterly OMG meeting week;
• teleconferences as required between OMG meetings.

The next face-to-face meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, 24 September 2019, during the OMG meeting in Nashville, Tenn., USA, from 10:30 to 15:00 Central US Daylight Savings Time. Remote participation will be available.

The agenda of our meetings generally follows this pattern:

• Welcome and introductions
• Review of papers completed or started during the previous quarter
• Special presentation(s) by a CWG member or an invitee
• Review of the potential upcoming paper, participant feedback and prioritization, new suggestions, etc.
• Discussion of other actions (events, standards efforts, etc.)
• Agenda items for the following face-to-face meeting

Notes from the CWG meeting on 18 June 2019 in Amsterdam

Notes from the CWG meeting on 24 Sep 2019 in Nashville (placeholder for next meeting)

The CSCC created 28 guides or papers during its existence. All of those become “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.

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.

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.

This status and plans were presented to the MARS Task Force in March 2019.

The roadmap for Q3 2019 work (with approval in June or September), still subject to discussion, includes:

• The December 2018 meeting raised the need for a Catalog of Cloud Standards.
• The December 2018 meeting also raised the potential need to revise the Interoperability Paper, even though it is relatively recent (December 2017), in order to add a new scenario about data migration, and mention interoperability patterns. David Harris and Beniamino Di Martino are the initial champions of this proposal.
• A new paper on Cyber Insurance and the Cloud may be proposed, in lieu of having added a large section on this subject in the Practical Guide to CSAs.
• A new paper, suggested by Karen Shunk (OMG) that would inherit work previously done by the ARTS Council (now the OMG Retail Domain Task Force or RDTF). This would be branded as a joint paper of the RDTF and CWG, and would go through the RDTF for approval. Tentative title: Practical Guide to Cloud Adoption in Retail. The focus would be on retail use cases, so that it would not repeat the content of other papers, but point to those papers instead.
• A new paper, suggested by Alex Tumashov (Schlumberger) on Data Governance in the Cloud. Karolyn Schalk commented:
  • Data governance is mentioned within the Practical Guide to Cloud Governance, to remind people that it is one of the governance types that needs to be “harmonized” when establishing cloud governance. Data governance is a pretty mature discipline, still too few organizations practice it thoughtfully, and lack of it is a major impediment to good data science results, and for creating quality machine learning models and then sustaining them. If a paper were initiated my suggestion would be to focus on “contemporary topics in data governance” and cover data science, AI, machine learning as reasons to adopt. A paper of 15 pages or less.

The revised roadmap will be submitted to feedback by the CWG members, either during a webinar or at the September 2019 meeting.

• 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.
• The OMG standard footer at the bottom of the cover page of a Discussion Paper says that it is not an official position of the OMG.
  • The OMG Technical Director agrees that we want to get rid of this message, which weakens the document.
  • The PSC will receive and examine this request in mid-2019.

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.

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

• Claude Baudoin and Karolyn Schalk (co-chairs)
• Paulo Takeda (IBM Brazil)
• Tracie Berardi (OMG staff)

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.

• 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)