NIST Releases Cloud Computing Roadmap

The government should establish common cloud computing products and services standards so agencies can easily shift their business to a new provider if their current vendor isn't meeting their needs, a government technology reviewer said Tuesday.

Without those standards, agencies may invest in major cloud programs that are quickly made obsolete by a superior competitor, according to the draft Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap from the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Agencies also might get locked into overpriced services because of high switching costs, the NIST document said.

Most agencies are able to change cloud providers, the report said, but not without an intervening step during which data is moved into noncloud storage. The government is in the early stages of a massive program to move roughly one-fourth of its $80 billion annual information technology budget to computer cloud storage...