Standardization Approaches within Cloud Computing: Evaluation of Infrastructure as a Service Architecture

Cloud Computing is becoming increasingly established and offers several opportunities to obtain IT services in an on-demand manner. Especially infrastructure services, like storage and scalable computing resources, are gaining relevance and provide alternatives to conventional sourcing models. Despite the Cloud paradigm of flexible and limitless scalability the lack of standardization presents a big challenge in this context. Due to many providers, which are using different Cloud software including proprietary interfaces, the interoperability in the Cloud remains a theoretical construct. In this paper we examine standardization approaches within Cloud Computing and provide a comparison to practical implementations of interfaces of relevant Cloud software on the market. Finally, characteristics for a potential Cloud standard on the infrastructure level will be postulated.