How to avoid cloud lock in

By Kelly Ng | 31 March 2010 | Permanent link | 3 comments

Just recently I finally made up my mind to join the 42.5 million people worldwide who own an iPhone. But my excitement quickly turned to frustration after a three-hour wait at the mobile shop. There was a compatibility problem moving 531 contacts from the Nokia phone to the iPhone. That was the day I learned – rather painfully – of the need for data portability and interoperability.

Interoperability in the cloud is a critical issue facing governments, large enterprises and the industry today. While vendors introduce cloud solutions that could lower costs, raise efficiency and ease manageability, end users are held back by worries of data portability, vendor-lock in and the lack of standards.

My recent conversations with end users confirmed that these concerns are real and here to stay. Last week, I joined a roomful of private and public sector IT leaders to discuss the issue of cloud interoperability. Over 90 per cent of the audience rated vendor lock-in as the most pressing question. Does the adoption of a vendor’s cloud computing platform – whether it is Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon, Google or Salesforce.com – imply vendor lock in?

Leong Mun Kew, Chief Information Officer at the Singapore National Library Board (NLB) admitted that getting data back or moving it from one cloud platform to another can be difficult. “When we implemented a cloud-based enquiry management centre, we understood and accepted that our data will be in a particular format. And if we were to take back the data in the standard CSV or XML format, parts of it might be lost,” he explained. He paralleled this to a consumer cloud service, Flickr, which is an online sharing application. “You can get back your photographs but you lose the annotations which you have created through the application.”

The degree of lock in depends on several factors around the nature of the application. The first is around inter-dependencies. “Is the application a standalone application or is it tied to 20 other applications?” asked Milinda Kotelawele, Founder, LongScale, a cloud consulting company. He recommended organisations to identify workloads that can be commoditised. “There are many small departmental applications that you can take and move onto different clouds without any type of vendor lock in. Storage is a good example. Put your non-critical documents in the cloud for 10 cents per gigabyte per month, instead of $5 your outsource provider is charging you.”

Second, ease of moving application or data depends on how you are leveraging the cloud service. According to Vijay Rajagopalan, Principal Architect, Interoperability Technical Strategy, Microsoft: “You need to ask how the application is leveraging the services within the cloud. When it is highly dependent on a unique service provided by the vendor, it will naturally be difficult for you to move. And the cost of migration could be high.”

The issue of lock in is not unique to cloud computing, cautioned Steven Miller, Dean of the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University. Some transactions would benefit from a long-term relationship while others do not. “You can easily switch between drycleaners week after week. On the other hand, you would value your relationship with a lawyer who has been engaged in a five-year negotiation project for you,” he explained. While governments and enterprises do not work with a single vendor, there are good reasons why they would establish partnerships with a few providers who have developed expertise and understanding of their business over time.

It is fortunate I have only 531 contacts to wreak my brains over. When I think of the magnitude of the same problem if faced by governments with millions of citizen contacts and data, it puts my problem into perspective.