Cloud Computing Standards: Too Many, Doing Too Little

Two years ago, when the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF) announced a standards-building effort for cloud computing, most people involved in cloud computing didn't even have a common definition of cloud computing. Now there are so many categories of cloud computing and so many competing standards that users have a good chance of finding a standard that matches a particular need, but not much chance of moving among them easily, says James Staten, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.