Cloud hurdles keep coming
Neelie Kroes, famous for overseeing sanctions against Microsoft as the European Commissioner for Competition has a new job. Since February last year she has been the Commissioner for Digital Agenda, which may make you wonder what she actually does. I have no idea really, except to see her in the news wading into cloud computing.
Last month Australian banks raised concerns about the lack of any regulation of cloud data and the risk of data being locked in by your chosen vendor. As it stands there aren’t even any standards for data compatibility, let alone portability. Neelie Kroes goes a step further arguing data portability is definitive goal for the EU.
“Users must be able to change their cloud provider easily. It must be as fast and easy as changing one’s internet or mobile phone provider has become in many places.”
In any new market there will be failures along the way and some vendors will end up with better services than other vendors. Data should be protected and able to be moved so organizations can take advantage of that.
This isn’t a theoretical problem, I know of people who lost thousands of dollars of web site development because their ISP folded at short notice taking their server, database and data with it. It’s all owned by the receiver now. One friend suggested going to the auction of the ISP’s hosting servers to try and recover the data. I mean what are you supposed to do in that situation?
Some early adopters of cloud storage are likely to be burned with lock-in and lock-out. Lock-in meaning their vendor still exists but has no economic means to port the data to any other vendor. Hard to see how this would be a high priority development project! Lock-out meaning the vendor has problems and access to your data is simply lost in a maze of bankruptcy or takeover laws.
The fact it’s all done overseas only makes everything worse.
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