NIST Releases Roadmap And Reference Model For Federal Cloud Computing

Source: NIST

The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) released two new documents aimed at accelerating the adoption of cloud computing in the federal government.

The NIST Cloud Computing Standards Roadmap includes a standards inventory, based on existing use cases, that NIST will continue to update. The working group behind the document surveyed the existing standards landscape for security, portability, and interoperability standards, as well as models, studies and use cases. It then set out to catalogu current standards, and identify standards gaps and standardization priorities.

The documents provide guidance for agencies to help understand the standards they should use when deploying clouds, as well as the categories of cloud services that can be used across the government, according to the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST).


NIST also issued a set of guiding design principles in a second document, the NIST Cloud Computing Reference Architecture. The principles are vendor-neutral, NIST officials said, and are meant to serve as a guideline for agencies, not to be followed specifically.