10 Tools To Prevent Cloud Vendor Lock-in
February 19, 2013
Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.
In enterprise computing, vendor lock-in is too often a fait accompli. Vendor lock-in happens when, for example, a particular company — such as IBM, Microsoft or Cisco Systems — becomes the dominant vendor behind a particular technology and develops products that capture the advance with proprietary elements. That prevents its customers from leaving and ensures that only proprietary vendors can continue to capitalize on the technology.
With IBM it was the mainframe. Microsoft for many years dominated end-user computing with its Windows operating system, and Cisco has become the dominant enterprise networking vendor in the Ethernet era. With the advent of cloud computing, however, customers can avoid lock-in by taking back some of that decision-making power. The cloud is a highly standardized environment, with new standards being added all the time — such as the DMTF’s Open Virtualization Format 2.0 (OVF) — allowing translation between the proprietary virtual machine formats…
One way to get locked into the cloud is to, say, use only tools that recognize VMware virtual machines or Amazon Web Services VMs based on Amazon Machine Images. These virtual file formats are proprietary. They can be converted and moved around, but you need the right tools to do so. Faced with the prospect that customers might do it themselves, Amazon Web Services has moved beyond recognizing only its own virtual machine format to recognize VMware’s as well. VMware and Microsoft recognize and produce some tools that work with each other’s file formats. The old lock-in bonds are already being eroded by the nature of cloud computing, and this process will continue…
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