Porting your Data as a Cloud Customer

Without any single dominant Cloud provider porting your data from one service to another is a grueling task. Depending on the service you are using; Iaas, Paas, or Saas all come with their own interoperability problems. Even something as simple as a Saas Cloud customer may want to move their data held in the cloud to an in-house server as your operations grow and become more streamlined. The problem is that your Cloud provider may not have the right tools for a convenient transition. For instance if you wanted to move all your emails to another client. Imagine forwarding each email individually, this is meant as an illustrative example only. Your platform may or may not have solutions to porting over into an new system.

For the consumer porting your services from one provider to another would be a significant boon. Before the consumer decides on a Cloud provider to host their operations they have to ask themselves what type of operations are they outsourcing. The nuances will vary according to type of Cloud service being utilized, and the needs their particular products have. For instance if you are utilizing an Saas Cloud system then the data stored on say iMessage wouldn’t transfer directly to Google Chat; or perhaps you are using a Paas system for your cloud services and coding in a particular platform. You might find that you would be able to minimize costs by switching Cloud Services but you might have to recode elements of your services or perhaps switch languages. The issues aren’t unsolvable these days, in fact we have even begun to write programs that debug programs, but that solution is in its infancy and would increase costs for the Cloud consumer.

The problems are a mixture of technical know how, and a business will. Interoperability in a general sense is the ability of an infrastructure to be able to connect and communicate with another structure without implementation or restriction of access. It is the ability for a service to be formatted so as to allow cross-platform communication. And each Cloud Service is going to want to showcase a unique product to their customer base. Essentially they will want to carve out a niche at the least, if not become the primary provider, and to do that they need to have a unique and powerful offering.

Some of the issues facing interoperability and ease of porting a customers data include: rebuilding applications, the actual transfer of data, and making sure the services the consumer needs exist on the new platform. From the customers perspective being able to have full service compliance would be important. You wouldn’t want as a customer to be going over to a new system and having your old files need to be reengineered just get the same tasks done. Or perhaps relearning a different set tools just to be able to do what you had been able to do originally. The actual porting of your data is another large hurdle that needs to be passed. Because in some instances the customer can’t reasonable port large quaintness of data by email, so the compliance of having the right in your first service provider and the right hook-up for your new provider needs to be run smoothly, let alone how the data is formatted. One reason sending the data by the internet is troublesome is there are security concerns that need to be considered when porting data over any public connection, even one that would encrypted.

So interoperability is an important step in being able to port your data as a Cloud service customer, and being a viable strengthening company in the current climate one often needs to move your services from one cloud to another, or to an in-house server.

Interoperability and Cloud Services

Interoperability in a general sense is the ability of an infrastructure to be able to connect and communicate with another structure without something translating, or restricting access. It is designed for a service to be formatted to allow cross-platform communication, in simpler terms. Word and Pages were not always interoperable, but rich text formatting was interoperable between the two. The ability for data to be moved from one format to another without a middle man is a key element. The other element for many service providers is access, if their product would be the dominant culture. The dominant cultural product would want to restrict certain information to maximize their products capabilities. So for something to be interoperable the data must be easily moved, and all of the data must be available; which is difficult for businesses to manage.

Each Cloud Service is going to want to showcase a unique product to their customer base. Essentially they will want to carve out a niche, if not become the primary provider; to do that they need to have a unique and powerful offering.

For a Cloud provider to be able to distinguish their service from others is paramount to be able to thrive in this new culture. With most new industries there is a relatively massive push and pull between different standards. Like the classic examples of Apple and Microsoft or even VHS and Betamax; this polar competition is a rough approximation to the standardization issues in interoperability of Cloud Services. In he Cloud world there is a much larger variety of services, even types of services, but the nitty-gritty of the issues is a need for a company to distinguish themselves amongst their competitors.

The vendor of a particular Cloud service may feel that they have a nifty offering, and they wouldn’t want to create an inferior product to meet an industry standard. Now if there ever is an industry standard, each company will have to decide if portability of offerings is necessary for them to compete with other services. They will be deciding between the particulars of their offering and the offerings needed to port from their competitors. But being able to move from a competitor also means the ability for their customers to move to one of their competitors. Not surprising the ability for your data, software, or platform to communicate and integrate with other services is the main difficulty with moving it. Portability is the ability to port or move your data from one system to another, not surprising the main issue with portability is interoperability. I am using data in a very general sense, it can mean literally the information stored on an Saas system, or the programs that are stored in a Paas system, for instance. The interoperability of your data wedges into this issue of porting information from one system to another. There are strides being made into interoperability, a growing desire from parts of the industry to have a standard to ease interoperability.

As a vendor of a Cloud service you have to consider whether you are utilizing the best practices as well as what is good for your company. Your company may be able to beat out competitors by having the best services provided and then the adoption of a standard set of services necessary for interoperability might cut down on the services offered. A company could end up giving a competitive edge over in search of complying to an industry standard. So, the need to be interoperable is not a task to consider lightly. There are many standardizations that would be good for a consumer but not necessarily for a vendor.