A Microsoft guy talking about cloud lock-in - very interesting development indeed.
The Cloud vendor lock-in debate between Tim Bray and DeWitt Clinton picked up considerable steam few days after I posted it here at Cloud Avenue. Dare Obasanjo takes on the issue of vendor lock-in head on and nails the most important issue facing the cloud vendors.
He asks a very pertinent question about the portability of data from one provider to another
So let's say your organization wants to move from a cloud based office suite like Google Apps for Business to Zoho. The first question you have to ask yourself is whether it is possible to extract all of your organization's data from one service and import it without data loss into another. For business documents this should be straightforward thanks to standards like ODF and OOXML. However there are points to consider such as whether there is an automated way to perform such bulk imports and exports or whether individuals have to manually export and/or import their online documents to these standard formats. Thus the second question is how expensive it is for your organization to move the data. The cost includes everything from the potential organizational downtime to account for switching services to the actual IT department cost of moving all the data. At this point, you then have to weigh the impact of all the links and references to your organization's data that will be broken by your switch. I don't just mean links to documents returning 404 because you have switched from being hosted at google.com to zoho.com but more insidious problems like the broken experience of anyone who is using the calendar or document sharing feature of the service to give specific people access to their data. Also you have to ensure that email that is sent to your organization after the switch goes to the right place. Making this aspect of the transition smooth will likely be the most difficult part of the migration since it requires more control over application resources than application service providers typically give their customers. Finally, you will have to evaluate which features you will lose by switching applications and ensure that none of them is mission critical to your business.
He then nails the issue by pointing out exactly what the vendors have to do.
The key wrinkle with cloud computing platforms is that there is no standardization of the APIs and platform technologies that underlie these services. The APIs provided by Amazon's cloud computing platform (EC2/S3/EBS/etc) are radically different from those provided by Google App Engine (Datastore API/Python runtime/Images API/etc). For zero lock-in to occur in this space, there need to be multiple providers of the same underlying APIs.
This is exactly what I pointed out in my post on the topic. There is absolutely no two opinions on this topic. We need standardized open API and open standards for data portability between cloud vendors. Also, as I pointed out in my post, with SaaS applications, there should be one click option to export (read: an easy and seamless way to migrate) data out of an application. I am totally with Dare on this and he has highlighted this point succinctly in his post.
What troubled me was his conclusion. I get a feeling that he is trying to pin the lock-in issue with cloud computing.
the fact is that today if a customer has heavily invested in either platform then there isn't a straightforward way for customers to extricate themselves from the platform and switch to another vendor. In addition there is not a competitive marketplace of vendors providing standard/interoperable platforms as there are with email hosting or Web hosting providers.
As long as these conditions remain the same, it may be that lock-in is too strong a word describe the situation but it is clear that the options facing adopters of cloud computing platforms aren't great when it comes to vendor choice.
I don’t think I agree with his conclusion because the situation is no different in the traditional desktop world. If a business invests in Microsoft Office for their productivity needs and, let us say, Peachtree Accounting for their accounting needs. Let us consider a situation where the business doesn’t want to upgrade the MS Office Suite and the accounting software in a bad economy and want to move to either Open Office or a SaaS productivity suite and an open source accounting software or freshbooks. Is it going to be an easy migration? No way. There are time consuming tasks like maintaining the formatting intact in documents, converting the documents to openoffice document format, issues like fixing the compatibility between wordart and fontwork, problems associated with importing data from one accounting software to another, etc.. These tasks make the migration expensive (but still cheaper than going through the process of upgrading the software with every release or every other release) and complicated. Plus, the options facing the customers are very limited due to the monopoly kind of marketshare held by Microsoft in the productivity app markets.
In short, life is not better in the traditional desktop world either. I wouldn’t place the blame on cloud vendors alone for this but on all vendors who don’t offer the necessary freedom to their customers in dealing with their own data. I would rather conclude the debate by only arguing that cloud vendors should adapt to standardized open APIs and open formats. Any attempt to portray this issue as a cloud computing issue is not correct.
A Microsoft guy talking about cloud lock-in - very interesting development indeed.
True. I didn't pursue that angle and, hence, my argument about desktop world in general.
Of course Krish this is why utilising the services of just one SaaS vendor that provides the entire breadth of apps will always be easier ;-) But yes - we need some clear standards to allow slicing and dicing
Ben, ask the guy who got locked out :-) See this comment by him http://www.searchenginejournal.com/open-letter-to-google-why-have-you-taken-away-my-google-gmail-accounts/7873/#comment-1086891
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