Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock (
) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.
In IEEE Cloud & Continuum, NIST's Robert Bohn and industry researchers, Craig Lee and Martial Michel published The IEEE 2302-2021 Standard on Intercloud Interoperability and Federation (p. 13), addressing the standard's significance and the way forward.
The authors note that the standard describes how two or more cloud providers could form a federation, allowing data and service sharing over a distributed environment. They also state that the IEEE defined the IEEE 2302-2021 standard based on the NIST Cloud Federation Reference Architecture. And they address federation uses that could produce societal benefits, including:
- "Cloud Bursting": This capability would allow a primary cloud to expand capabilities by using an external cloud, like when a private cloud needs a public cloud's resources.
- International Disaster Response: Information sharing in and beyond disaster regions could be achieved with federations, where data access is based on authorizations.
- Virtual Mission Infrastructures: A federation could enable different organizations working together on a mission to access data needed, based on authorizations.
- National Strategic Computing Reserve: This is an initiative being developed by the National Science and Technology Council that will connect compute resources for use in national emergencies.
- Federated Analytics: The Confidential Computing Consortium has identified use cases for Trusted Execution Environments in which remote users need analytics and which a federation could enable.
The authors state that several federation-based systems are operational but have limited levels of applications purposes. They further say that the IEEE standard advances a "Federation Hosting Service" model and identifies increased capability levels for building to it:
- Level 1: Core application programming interface supports basic operations
- Level 2: Core application supports accounting, billing, and auditing
- Level 3: Core application supports legal agreements and regulatory compliance
- Level 4: Core application supports automation across the federation lifecycle