CA Technologies has unveiled its participation in MODAClouds, a collaborative research project that aims to facilitate interoperability between heterogeneous Cloud platforms.
The MODAClouds project is financed in part by the European Commission and run by a consortium of ten partners (software vendors, IT services companies, research bodies and universities). It aims to remove the constraints of deployment, portability and reversibility for end users of cloud services.
According to CA, many professional associations are looking for cloud services which are interoperable, reversible and based on open standards. MODAClouds’ objective is to give these companies the means to optimally manage their relationships with their cloud providers.
In October 2012, after a call for project submissions focused on interoperability for cloud services, the European Commission selected the MODAClouds program over dozens of other competing programs. The budget for this project is approximately 9 million Euros. While the European Commission contributes approximately two-thirds of this amount, the partners contribute the balance.
The thought here is as companies adopt more and more private cloud services, the selection of which cloud provider to work with has become a crucial decision point. Moreover, multi-cloud strategies are being implemented. They consist of using two or more cloud services from different suppliers in parallel in order to mitigate the risk of losing data or connectivity interruptions due to an isolated outage.
The MODAClouds project will address the multi-modal cloud, the issues of vendor lock-in and dependence, and KPIs for availability and quality of service. The research project will also explore the emergence of a standard criteria to select and compare the functionalities of cloud services.
