A number of cloud computing experts joined Christofer Hoff, the Director of Cloud & Virtualization Solutions at Cisco, in his project to develop a standard interface to simplify the auditing and the security assessment of cloud computing infrastructures.
Originally called Automated Audit, Assertion, Assessment, and Assurance API (A6), the interface has been later renamed CloudAudit API.
The working group that is developing it includes representatives from Akamai, Amazon, Arcteck, CloudScaling, CSC, enStratus, Google, Microsoft, Orchestratus, Rackspace, Savvis, TELUS, Unisys and VMware.
The team published the API 1.0 as an IETF draft at the beginning of the week:
CloudAudit provides a common interface, naming convention, set of processes and technologies utilizing the HTTP protocol to enable cloud service providers to automate the collection and assertion of operational, security, audit, assessment, and assurance information.
This provides duly authorized and authenticated consumers and brokers of cloud computing services to automate requests for this data and metadata.
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