NIST

NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is a bureau in the US department of commerce whose aim is to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology. NIST developed a Cloud Computing Programme which is part of the general US Federal Cloud computing Strategy and whose main goal is to accelerate the federal government’s secure adoption of cloud computing .

NIST cloud computing programme
The objective of NIST is to provide a direction for US government CIOs to initiate any new ICT investments concerning cloud applications, thus helping CIOs and their agencies to identify interoperability, portability and security requirements  to adopt cloud computing. The chosen methodology encompasses a strategic and a tactical programme. Contributions of specific working groups, such as the SAJACC – Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart the Adoption of Cloud Computing help the drive towards the adoption of Cloud Computing.

NIST Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart the Adoption of Cloud Computing (SAJACC)
The goal of the SAJACC initiative is to drive the formation of high-quality cloud computing standards by providing worked examples showing how key use cases can be supported on cloud systems that implement a set of documented and public cloud system specifications. The SAJACC initiative will develop and maintain a set of cloud system use cases through an open and ongoing process engaging industry, other Government agencies, and academia. Simultaneously, the SAJACC initiative will collect and generate cloud system specifications through a similarly open and ongoing process.
The SAJACC initiative will develop tests that show the extent to which specific use cases can be supported by cloud systems that implement documented and public cloud system specifications, and will publish test results on the SAJACC web portal.