State Street, ING Join Enterprise Cloud Initiative

Seven new companies, including State Street and ING, have joined the Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council.

The Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council (ECLC), a group run by TM Forum that allows cloud users to establish requirements and drive the development of best practices and standards that could remove the barriers to deployment and adoption of cloud services, has named seven new member companies, including State Street Financial and ING.

The other new members to the ECLC, which is chaired by Deutsche Asset Management's CIO Sean Kelley, include Boeing, Defense Information Services Agency (DISA) of the US Department of Defense, Dassault Systems, McCann Worldgroup and Northrop-Grumman. The ECLC was founded in 2009 by Deutsche Bank and Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

By leading standards development with reference implementations contributed by ECLC members, and enabling collaboration with cloud suppliers based on real requirements, the ECLC is hoping to accelerate the adoption of cloud services within major enterprise IT. The new companies join ECLC to help create a path forward for the use of cloud services, while realizing the promises of financial gains and business flexibility.

ECLC represents the users of cloud services within the TM Forum's Cloud Services Initiative, which aims to stimulate growth of an open marketplace for cloud services by bringing together enterprise users and cloud providers. The role of the ECLC is to develop common approaches on important aspects of cloud services such as common terminology, common approaches to allow transparent movement from supplier to supplier, security issues, benchmarking and more.

The ECLC is working to develop the standards to help lower some of the common barriers to cloud, such as data portability, security of data, interoperability, service level agreements between multiple parties, and a common language to define services. Standardizing in these areas could simplify the business agreements and business processes needed to purchase, deploy, monitor and manage cloud services, and helps both the cloud service provider and enterprise customer communities in working with each other and with partners.

Greg MacSweeney is editorial director of InformationWeek Financial Services, whose brands include Wall Street & Technology, Bank Systems & Technology, Advanced Trading, and Insurance & Technology. View Full Bio