New Cloud Commons Community Helps IT professionals to learn and engage with peers.  This new community will help them figure out how to best use cloud computing in the world we live in.

“We are helping to develop a set of business-centric measures, mixing quantitative and qualitative data, that will provide chief information officers with a standardized method for comparing cloud services from internal or external providers,” Jane Siegel and Jeff Perdue, both senior scientists at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley, said in a statement.

Among the key components of the site will be:

• A marketplace of cloud computing service offerings. This marketplace is expected to include vendor service ratings to enable participants to compare service options.
• An area that will allow participants to provide feedback on their experience with third-party cloud services.
• Features that will encourage: peer collaboration and networking, commentary on content posted on the site, and the sharing of cloud best practices.
• Articles from industry analysts and subject matter experts, blog feeds from industry leaders, as well as white papers and stories on experiences from IT professionals.

Questions that they help IT cloud professionals answer:

• What is cloud computing?
• How is cloud computing different from hosting and outsourcing?
• Why has cloud computing emerged now?
• What are the benefits of cloud computing?
• What are the risks of cloud computing?
• What workloads should we run in the cloud today? What shouldn’t we run in the cloud?
• Should we move to a private cloud as a steppingstone to the public cloud?
• What three questions should we ask a cloud computing provider?
• How should we get started with cloud computing?
• Is cloud computing a revolution or an evolution?

“Today, there is no comprehensive, unbiased source that solicits and aggregates the most current and relevant knowledge about cloud computing and the accumulated, actual experiences that organizations are having with the cloud,” said David Hodgson, senior vice president of the Cloud Products & Solutions business line at CA Technologies. “Cloud Commons will address this need — providing IT professionals with situational awareness and visibility into what is possible with the cloud.”  This should help our world to develop a standard for cloud hosting.  This will help everyone to be on the same page.