Computer clouds need to become as interoperable and as instantly portable as they are elastic and easily scaled if enterprises are to take full advantage of their business benefits.

This is the view of none other than Vint Cerf, the famed co-designer of the internet’s basic architecture, TCP/IP, and now chief internet evangelist at Google. “People will want to move data around between clouds and they are going to want clouds to interact to take advantage of the computing power those clouds have,” he told a gathering earlier this year at the Churchill Club, the influential Silicon Valley business and technology forum. “There’s a whole raft of work still to be done – protocols to be designed and standards to be adopted – that will allow us to manage assets in multiple clouds, and for clouds to interact with each other.”

He continued: “We’re at the same point now in 2010 with intercloud as we were in 1973 with internet.”

One work in progress is around the development of standardised cloud application programming interfaces (APIs). Championed by industry standards body the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), these will reduce customer dependency on any one particular cloud provider.

A standardised cloud API will allow customers to switch between cloud providers to ensure optimal service levels “without the need for changing their applications”, outlined Fujitsu when it recently announced its backing for the open cloud approach. It has submitted its cloud API specification to the DMTF, saying it is implementing it in its next generation infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

According to Chiseki Sagawa, president of service-oriented platform strategy and development at Fujitsu: “With cloud interoperability, customers can freely choose the most suitable cloud services from public cloud service vendors or develop their own cloud infrastructures on their premises.”

Vendor lock-in is considered one of the early dangers of cloud, a recent Cloud Computing Risk Assessment by the European Network and Information Security Agency noted. It can make it difficult for the customer to migrate from one provider to another, or move cloud data and services back to an in-house IT environment. But standards should be in place to address this in the near-term.

Cerf is certainly optimistic. “It took five years to develop the internet protocols and another five years to implement them. The intercloud could be solved within five years.”