On February 2, 2011, a little over a year after the last draft, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has some news to share. It has published a new draft (Special Publication 800-145, January 2011, by Tim Grance and Peter Mell), a guidance document on security and privacy in the public cloud (Special Publication 800-144, January 2011, by Tim Grance and Wayne Jansen), and launched an online collaboration platform on cloud computing, the NIST Cloud Computing Collaboration Site, which includes the following sections open for collaboration:

• Business Use Cases,
• Reference Architecture and Taxonomy,
• Standards Roadmap,
• Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart the Adoption of Cloud Computing (SAJACC),
• Cloud Security.

There are no substantial differences between the v.15 definition dated October 7, 2009, and this one—just a few minor adjustments to the text—but when you visit the collaboration site, you can see that there has been activity at NIST related to cloud computing; There were two workshops—one in May and the other in November 2010—and another is scheduled for April 2011.

In the document *Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart Adoption of Cloud Computing* (SAJACC), presented at the May 2010 workshop, there is a point that should be revisited…. Here is the slide in question:

What is particularly noteworthy about this slide? Of the three service levels, only IaaS involves a hypervisor, which means that both PaaS and SaaS can be implemented without a virtualized infrastructure. This ties backto the event we organized when Greenpeace published a report condemning cloud computing for contributing to increased energy demand and pollution. Among our slides, we published the following:

This illustrates how the lack of a requirement for certain energy-saving measures in data centers can turn cloud computing into a waste of resources.

It is our intention to engage with NIST through the collaboration platform to discuss the environmental risks associated with this key issue.