national institute of standards and technology (NIST)

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is the national standardization institute of the USA. It sets the standards for all units, for number systems, as well as for physical and engineering units. These include weights and measures, physical and electrical quantities such as time, force, frequency, temperature, current, voltage, resistance, capacitance, radiation, and others.

Incommunications, NIST sponsors the OSI Implementors Workshop (OIW), which provides an open forum for the development of U.S.-based open standards agreements. The results are incorporated into GOSIP requirements.

NIST grew out of the National Bureau of Standards( NBS) and is charged with promoting the use of computers in business by promoting open systems standards and their interoperability. It has defined various IT service and infrastructure models. So too have the service models for cloud computing, which for NIST consist of Infrastructure as a Service( IaaS), Platform as a Service( PaaS) and Software as a Service( SaaS).

The Computing Division within NIST manages the Advanced Encryption Standard( AES).