Is Your Future in 'The Cloud'?

It's important to note that with most cloud services there's no practical way to switch away if service gets bad. Let's say your niche cloud provider stops satisfying your business needs but doesn't provide an interface with which to download your data. You are forced to tell them I'm cancelling my service, er, and by the way can I please have all my data? Hopefully the data makes enough sense to be able to access later or import into another product.

One other issue with a "cloud computing" model is that you have no opportunity to patch any bugs or to keep an old version running if the provider decides that they only support a certain version. Free software such as Firefox, OpenOffice, and GNU/Linux distributions like gNewSense give you and your business complete freedom in fixing any problem you may encounter or implementing any feature you desire. This kind of software often happens to be free-of-cost though the main reason they were created was to secure user/customer freedom.

David Sterry of CA 2:05AM May 06, 2009