CIOIN

The Open Group has published two new industry standards that enable businesses to integrate SOA (service orientated architecture) and cloud computing into their enterprise infrastructure.

The open standards group has released the SOA Reference Architecture (SOA RA), a blueprint for creating and evaluating SOA solutions; and the Service-Oriented Cloud Computing Infrastructure Framework (SOCCI), the first cloud standard of The Open Group. 

The SOA RA provides a vendor-neutral reference architecture to help organisations assess product solutions, define roadmaps, and solution and reference architectures. It also provides a common reference for standards bodies to work against and from.

SOCCI, meanwhile, outlines the "concepts and architectural building blocks necessary for infrastructures to support SOA and cloud initiatives", according to the Open Group. It helps organisations incorporate cloud-based resources and services into their infrastructure to achieve increased agility and scale.

"It is imperative that business and IT drivers are aligned," said Chris Harding, director for interoperability at the Open Group. "Each of these standards is vendor-neutral and helps an organisation of any size to design and implement the proper SOA and cloud solutions for its business objectives."