Managing the cloud

How to manage cloud computing as part of an overall IT strategy

Vendor lock-in

Vendor lock-in can be another fear for IT managers and one which varies depending on the type of cloud services you’re procuring.

Compatibility issues generally occur as you move higher into the application layer, but there can be differences in the way each vendor provisions the move to a virtualised infrastructure, says IDC’s Lai.

“Today, migrating data on and off clouds is not an issue, and even then we expect to see more in the way of meta-data tagging to improve portability,” he says. “There will always be some lock-in until the day we see more ‘open’ standards cloud provisioning.”

Lock-in can occur within individual cloud services — such as Google Apps or Amazon’s EC2 which have specific APIs that are difficult or don’t translate to other providers. It can also occur within cloud environments, such as VMware’s v Cloud.

“The great thing is that, while yes you’re still locked in, in a way, if you do have a cloud provider and you’re not happy or their cost is too high you can just move your data to a new provider and you don’t have to reinstall everything,” Melbourne IT’s Gore says. “You get a new set of APIs as they’ll be the same across the environment.”


Spotlight: AAPT's COO, David Yuile, on managing the move to Google's public cloud.

For Simon Kaye, ANZ cloud computing lead architect at IBM, the issue isn’t about vendor lock-in; it’s data lock-in.

“If your vendor makes you follow certain standards that over time the application market moves away from — APIs et cetera — then you are stuck either adapting custom code or staying on back-level versions of your applications,” he says. Next: Interoperability

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