TM Forum, an association which not only includes technology vendors such as HP and IBM, but more than 750 of the world’s largest service providers in the communications, media and cloud service markets, has just delivered what it calls the industry’s first set of ‘Enterprise-Grade External Compute Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Requirements’. Put together by the association’s Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council (ECLC), the document includes guidelines for terminology, requirements for external private clouds in commercial, technical and operational terms, the business case for external private clouds, and sample use cases. It also details how business and technical agreements between enterprise customers and cloud service providers should be defined and managed to maximize benefits for both parties.
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