Here is an interesting perspective on cloud computing from the Economist. The article contends that customers subscribing to an on-demand service should be wary of data ownership and the data migration difficulties they will face when moving their data from one SaaS (software as a service) vendor to another. The author positions open source as a liberating technology and sees cloud computing as new attempt by software vendors to lock-in customers.

This is the first time I ever heard anyone argue against cloud computing. To tout on-premise open source systems as liberating technologies and to call SaaS and cloud computing as a step back is simply out of touch with what is occurring in the marketplace. At the heart of its argument against cloud computing is the lack of standards for moving data from one service provider to another. However, the same can be said for migrating data from one on-premise solution to another, whether open-source or not. For example, have you ever tried moving data from an Oracle application into a Microsoft or SAP application? No common standards exist today that would automate the migration of any form of enterprise data from one solution provider to another.

However, the process of importing data has become a relatively painless, inexpensive and a low risk activity for most forms of data. Data in most modern enterprise applications (on-premise or on-demand) is represented in XML or can easily be exported to XML, now a ubiquitous standard for data representation and data exchange. Using XML, just about every cloud service provider (and even legacy application providers) have the tools and the expertise to migrate data from the customer’s current formats and systems. There may of course be some minor challenges to overcome and the migration may require investment in a few days of consulting services but I do not at all see how data migration results in vendor lock-in.

One thing that customers need to make sure of is data ownership. Tenrox project management software and workforce management customers own their data, whether they are on-demand or on-premise. This assures our customers that they are totally free to move to another service provider.

Cloud computing has tremendous benefits for the customer. The service provider takes care of all the details of software maintenance, bug fixing, data backups, 24/7 availability, 99.9% up time, data security audits and certifications, bandwidth, worldwide access, and much more. This frees internal IT to spend time on more strategic work such as IT project portfolio and resource optimizations, data analysis, portal/report development, and activities that are directly related to the company’s core business.