No way out?

Longform
(Image: Stockfresh)

15 January 2015

Any company thinking of undertaking a move from one cloud provider to another needs to know exactly what they are shopping for, and service providers aren’t well known for making it easy for clients to move on. After all, why would any company invest time and effort and money in making it easier for a customer to leave them?

“What I say to customers when they’re considering a cloud service is that part of planning is considering how you’ll get out of it later,” said Boyle. “A major roadblock companies will encounter when they start to investigate moving is that it’s extremely difficult to compare them on operating costs.”

“They tend to charge at different price points for different services and at different rates, including different levels of service within what they are charging for. Security is the next big major issue. Of course customers want to be able to validate their security issues and be very comfortable about them and being sure that a migration process will be safe is not easy.”

“Thirdly, lock-in is a real issue. From small companies with twenty users that I’ve spoken to up to quite large organisations with over 1,000 users and even government bodies – they all find that their previous experience procuring IT services isn’t useful in terms of figuring out how to move their data to a new provider,” he said.

Cloud brokers
According to Steven Cochrane, business and systems integration senior manager with at Accenture Ireland, this situation is giving rise to the appearance of cloud brokers that sit between the client organisation and the providers and can mediate moves.

“We have the Accenture Cloud Platform, for example, but there are other systems integrators and other niche players offering cloud brokering services. The way I see it, in the future it will be much more common for accounts to move and there will be much more fluidity between services,” he said.

Lorcan Cunningham, Managing Director, Savenet Solutions_web

You need to think about how you might mechanically recover your data — if you have several terabytes and maybe 100 virtual machines, it might not be feasible to pull all that data out across the Internet. There might be an option to talk to the cloud provider to export your VMs out onto moveable media but there could be a charge for that, and a timeframe that they’re willing to work to, Lorcan Cunningham, Savenet Solutions

Right now, the problem many companies face if they want to move is that there are conflicting methodologies used, and clear industry standards have yet to emerge that might facilitate cloud migration.

“If you compare Amazon to Azure, for example, the languages and scripting used are quite unique but over time open standards will converge to make it easier to move. A bigger question right now is whether or not the cloud service providers would want to encourage that and therefore will they come together and agree on a set of standards or will it have to be imposed upon them?” said Cochrane.

“That’s where cloud brokers come in. For example what we’re doing is building a translation layer, so regardless of what the customer wants, we will build scripts for Amazon, scripts for Google, scripts for Azure and so on. Through your cloud-brokering platform, you could essentially choose where to deploy your various workloads so you’re not reliant on standards.”

According to Accenture, it is important to examine the small print of cloud agreements. Companies that have started a migration process have discovered that terminating a contract can leave them with logistical headaches.

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