Comments on Nasuni blog on the cloud's little secret

After speaking with Andres Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of Nasuni about his company’s interesting cloud storage offering, I spent a little bit of time on the company’s website.

Nasuni, by the way, is offering a clever, simplified cloud storage and protection service that could make life easier for many mid-tier companies. I’m working on editing a Nasuni customer profile and hope to post it in the near future.

While visiting the Nasuni website, I came across an insightful post, The Cloud’s Little Secret: Vendor Lock-In and thought the ideas there would be worth a few comments.

Is Lock-in simply part of the package?

If one looks objectively at many Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings, it is easy to come to the conclusion lock-in is part of the service!  Call it an added feature if you’d like.Once an organization puts there data into these applications or uses the suppliers proprietary application framework and APIs, the customer is firmly locked in.

This one of the reasons that large organizations are waiting for standards to emerge allowing a greater level of interoperability and data migration. Other reasons include concerns about security, data retention, compliance and the ability to survive an audit.

Rushing in can be a survival thing

That being said, many organizations are rushing in anyway. It appears that they are more concerned with lowering their overall costs now. They’re not really thinking far enough into the future to put lock-in avoidance on their list of priorities.

I guess the decision-makers’ reasoning is that if the company doesn’t lower its overall costs now, it won’t survive. If it doesn’t  survive, what difference does a little lock-in make?

Looking back, will survivors think rushing in was a good approach?

A few years down the road, however, survivors are likely to take a dim view of the decision-makers who gladly donned a vendor’s handcuffs and ankle chains to save a little money. I guess we’ll all have to see how this plays out.