NIST drafts new cloud metrics guide

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has drafted a new guide aimed at helping organizations find the right cloud service.

Announced Monday, the publication, called “Cloud Computing Service Metrics Description,”(PDF) is currently in a public comment phase. According to NIST, the 25-page guide “discusses the basic nature of the problem of measuring cloud services and offers a model and method for developing appropriate cloud metrics,” a release said.

An example of a “customer response metric,” for instance, might be characterized as “the time it takes from someone hitting ‘send' on an email until it's delivered to a recipient on the same cloud service,” NIST explained.

The draft noted that metrics for cloud services impact operations within the “cloud ecosystem,” such as security, auditing and accounting tasks. The deadline for comments on the draft is January 24, 2015.