All clouds are not created equal, and all clouds do not create equal lock-in. Consider the following questions regarding the portability of your current application from one environment or cloud to another. They provide a way to measure the degree to which you may risk lock-in with a given cloud choice.

• Application – Do you own the application that manages your data, or do you need another tool to move your data or application?

Web services – Does your application make use of third-party web services that you would have to find or build alternatives to?

Development & run-time environment – Does your application run in a proprietary run-time environment and/or is it coded in a proprietary development environment? Would you need to retrain programmers and rewrite your application to move to a different cloud?

Programming language – Does your application make use of a proprietary language or language version? To move to a different cloud, would you need to hire new programmers to rewrite your application?

Data model – Is your data stored in a proprietary or hard-to-reproduce data model or storage system? Can you continue to use the same type of database or data storage organization if you moved, or do you need to transform all your data (and the code accessing it)?

Data – Can you actually bring your data with you, and if so, in what form? Can you get everything exported raw, or only in certain slices or views?

Log files and analytics – Do you own your history and/or metrics and can you move it to a new cloud, or do you need to start from scratch?

Operating system and system software – Do your system administrators control the operating system platform, the versions of libraries, and tools so that you can move the know-how and operational procedures from one cloud to another?

Some things we probably need to think about for the UMF Cloud PIlot...

The overall issue of regulating the cloud is far from anecdotal. Within a few years, we can bet the bulk of our hard drives – individual as well as collective ones – will be in other people's large hands: Amazon S3 storage service now stores 339bn objects – twice last year's volume.
We'll gain in terms of convenience and efficiency. We should also gain in security.

6 good pointers for things we need to think about in developing our UMF Cloud Pilot.