The Cloud Standards Customer Council™ (CSCC™) has published version 2.0 of its white paper, Interoperability and Portability for Cloud Computing: A Guide. Authors of the paper will present a complimentary webinar on January 24, 2018, from 11:00am – 12:00pm ET to introduce the paper.

Today, organizations are employing a wide range of cloud services and transitioning data and applications to cloud computing environments. The topics of “interoperability” and “portability” are significant considerations in relation to the use of cloud services, but there is also confusion and misunderstanding of exactly what this entails. The aim of this guide is to provide a clear definition of interoperability and of portability and how these relate to various aspects of cloud computing and to cloud services.

Version 2.0 has been updated to reflect the new ISO/IEC 19941 Cloud Computing Interoperability and Portability standard and its facet models of interoperability, data portability, and application portability. The model of an application and the process of porting an application have been updated to reflect new thinking contained in ISO/IEC 19941. Additionally, containers and the role of automation have been addressed, as these have become dominant trends for cloud users.

The paper provides guidance for avoiding vendor-lock in, which allows customers to make the best use of multiple diverse cloud services that can cooperate and interoperate with each other, which is critical to future cloud service adoption and the realization of the benefits of computing as a utility.