Lately NIST is very much intrigued with Cloud computing infrastructures, …not sure it is part of President Obama’s Stimulus plan ! Without doubt it makes the US Government as the most influential Cloud customer. Like everyone else, NIST also feels Security as the paramount challenge ahead before adoption…. ofcourse, Security cannot be an afterthought or post-mortem process after a breach !  Couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine noted me that NIST is working on an architecture and evolving minimal set of standards and guidelines for adopting to “Cloud Infrastructure Providers”.  More importantly, they are looking for the implementation options about migrating US Federal applications to Cloud infrastructure and to identify Security strategies for centralizing and enforcing security and privacy and ensuring compliance with the current/upcoming federal regulatory mandates.

Upcoming NIST Special Publication For Cloud Computing Security

For those curious, you may take a look at the complete NIST presentation (Peter Mell and Tim Grance) available here.