Users reveal their biggest concerns with the cloud

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

I recently wrote a story about what some folks in the cloud industry see as the biggest issues holding back adoption of cloud computing. Topics like process, security and data integration all came up. But all those people are from the vendor side of the house.

Recently, I had a chance to go to a customer event hosted by SunGard Availability Services in Austin, Texas where a couple dozen CIOs shared their thoughts about where the cloud industry is and what they would like to see from it. Many of these CIOs are open to using the cloud, but they have some concerns. Here are some of the top apprehensions about the cloud in general that I heard:…

The Hotel California effect – you can get data in, but it can never leave

One concern that was reiterated a number of times was around end of life care for data and the exit strategy customers should consider. It’s pretty easy to get data up into the public IaaS cloud, but what happens when your contract is done? How can customers be guaranteed that the data is completely wiped from your cloud provider’s hardware? Some others in the audience said this can be accomplished by negotiating into your service level agreement (SLA) proof that data has been wiped from discs. Is that realistic? It seems like it would depend on your provider and how big of a customer you are…

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