Page 112 - Multicloud Workshop - Prework

Cloud Characteristics

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a U.S. government agency, part of
the U.S. Department of Commerce, that is responsible for establishing and providing standards of
all types as needed by industry or government programs.

The NIST defines the cloud solution as having these characteristics:

Multitenancy and isolation: This characteristic defines how multiple organizations use and share a
common pool of resources (network, compute, storage, and so on) and how their applications
and services that are running in the cloud are isolated from each other.

Security: This feature is implicitly included in the previous characteristic, multitenancy and
isolation. It defines not only the security policy, mechanisms, and technologies that are used to
secure the data and applications of companies that are using cloud services, but it is also
anything that secures the infrastructure of the cloud itself.

Automation: This feature is an important characteristic that defines how a company can get the
resources and set up its applications and services in the cloud, without too much intervention
from the cloud service support staff.

Standards: There should be standard interfaces for protocols, packaging, and access to cloud
resources so that the companies that are using an external cloud solution (that is, a public cloud
or open cloud) can easily move their applications and services between the cloud providers.

Elasticity: The flexibility and elasticity allows users to scale up and down at will—utilizing the
resources of all kinds (CPU, storage, server capacity, load balancing, and databases).

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