DMTF, the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on the development, validation and promotion of infrastructure management standards, today announced release of its latest standard: the Cloud Auditing Data Federation (CADF) Data Format and Interface Definitions 1.0. More than a format, the CADF standard defines a full event model anyone can use to fill in the essential data needed to certify, self-manage and self-audit application security in cloud environments.

Potential consumers of cloud deployments need assurance that the security policies they require on their applications are as consistently managed and enforced “in the cloud” as they would be in their enterprise. CADF is an open standard that addresses this need by enabling cross-vendor information sharing via today’s newly-released data format and interface definitions. Supporting the federation of normative audit event data to and from cloud providers, CADF delivers new levels of insight into the provider’s hardware, software, and network infrastructure used to run specific tenant applications in a multi-vendor environment – whether private, public or hybrid.

With a robust query interface that can be extended to reflect the unique resources of each provider, this standard also defines a means to attach domain-specific identifiers, event classification values, and tags that can be used to dynamically generate customized logs and reports for cloud subscribers or customers. In addition, CADF goes beyond log-based periodic audits to offer the ability to perform real-time performance metering and monitoring, which can be used to assure customer Quality-of-Service.

“Organizations should be able to preserve their investments in the processes and tooling that provides them with the audit data they need, regardless of the cloud deployment model or the provider hosting the application,” said Winston Bumpus, DMTF chair of the board. “Open standards for cloud auditing data formats, along with open standardized interfaces for interacting with that data, help assuage security concerns and allow companies to easily compare the costs of hosting their application with various cloud providers without losing the ability to audit them.”

To learn more about the CADF standard and its importance to cloud infrastructures, please join today's live webinar at 9:00 a.m. US central time in the DMTF Learning Center at www.dmtf.org/education/webinars.

Industry Support for the DMTF CADF Standard

“As a DMTF board member and an active member of CADF working group, Fujitsu is pleased with the release of the CADF standard. Standardization of cloud computing technologies is important to our users, and we have contributed to the development of various standards and open-source activities. This significant milestone enables cloud vendors and open-source communities to provide interoperable auditing and monitoring of cloud services,” said Hiroshi Nagakura, VP of Strategy and Technology Division, Platform Strategic Planning Unit, Fujitsu Limited.

“We are gratified with the rapid adoption of the CADF standard in support of enhanced auditing features of cloud deployments. This is one of those features that will make cloud deployments more practical for serious business use,” said Yoshiki Matsuda, vice president, IT Platform R & D Management Division, Hitachi, Ltd.

“The release of the DMTF Cloud Auditing Data Federation (CADF) v1.0 standard is a significant step forward in providing enterprise customers an open standard to reliably audit their critical applications and data in Cloud deployments providing validation of corporate and industry compliance,” said Angel Diaz, VP Open Technology and Cloud Performance at IBM. “CADF, now integrated in OpenStack, also enables the accurate monitoring of Cloud infrastructures and resources by providing real-time, analytic data to immediately identify and dynamically adapt to operational and performance challenges.”

“NetIQ® is pleased to be a contributor to the DMTF's Cloud Auditing Data Federation standard 1.0 to help define the essential data needed to audit and certify clouds in a normative, prescriptive manner,” commented John Delk, vice president, Product Management at NetIQ. “Such standards are critical for today’s organizations seeking greater security intelligence on the complex threat landscape and how they impact security postures and organizational risk.”

Detailed information on all of DMTF standards can be found at www.dmtf.org/standards. Those interested in supporting and joining DMTF’s efforts to identify and create standards can be found at www.dmtf.org/join.