Managed Service Provider Week in Review

While the managed services space underwent its usual flutter of partnership and product and service announcements this week, the big news was centered on standardization and regulatory compliance. With the cloud becoming an increasingly entrenched part of the managed services world, adherence to standard practices to meet a variety of compliance mandates becomes critical.

One of the biggest announcements this week surrounded the Cloud Foundry PaaS standard, with both SAP and Rackspace committing a combined $3 million to the effort. Cloud Foundry aims to create a PaaS for running clouds as well as an open governance model that will guide the cloud development process. The ecosystem will ultimately enable users to build and run applications for taking advantage of giant amounts of data efficiently and cost effectively.

A new IDC study shows that Datacenter Interconnect (DCI) services are growing rapidly as datacenters increasingly deal with giant amounts of data as well as the need to connect to each other efficiently and in a standardized way. Regulatory mandates, as well as the explosion of big data are driving DCI services and standards development.

On the mobility front, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) teamed up with the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) group this week to promote a standards-based approach for handling large-scale cloud services and mobile authentication within the cloud. The two standards groups believe that providing scalable authentication from mobile devices to multiple, heterogeneous cloud providers is a crucial component in the growth of cloud solutions.

And the TM Forum announced its Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management (ZOOM) project this week, in an effort to create standardized practices for rolling out services on elastic networks. The new initiative will identify and define security approaches for protecting infrastructure, functions and services across all layers of hardware and software.