Federal Standards Body Focuses On Big Data, Cloud

The National Institute of Standards and Technology's IT Laboratory, which works on IT standards and metrics as well as federal cybersecurity programs, will be placing a new focus on big data and mobility technologies this year and will continue its work on cybersecurity and cloud computing, according to IT Lab Director Chuck Romine.

Romine, who took over for retiring IT Lab director Cita Furlani last fall, told InformationWeek that NIST will be increasing its work on standards, interoperability, reliability, and usability of big data technologies. Government and the private sector continue to amass huge data sets to help facilitate everything from more targeted marketing to improved government oversight. "NIST can have a lot of impact on the big data question," Romine said, noting that the agency has been involved for years in analysis of how the federal government and private sector can better harness the power of large quantities of data. In 2009, for example, NIST helped publish a report called "Harnessing the Power of Digital Data." The "inexorable push to mobility," as Romine called it, is another one of NIST's new priorities, he said. That work includes, among other things, developing new standards for wireless network technologies. The other new project that Romine is working on is a strategic planning process in which he plans to engage other agencies and the private sector to help decide which technologies to focus on going forward. Despite these new areas of focus, however, Romine said he will carry over many of the priorities of his predecessor Furlani, who he said left things in good shape at the agency.