Open Cloud Sync and Standards Matter More Now Than Ever

by Sam Dean - Mar. 17, 2010Comments (1)

We've written numerous times about how significant open source and open standards are becoming in cloud computing, and about how many companies and organizations are pursuing hybrid public/private cloud solutions. For those, flexible and open software platforms are extremely promising. Today, in an interesting post, Canonical's Matt Asay notes that whether an organization's approach to synchronization is open is critical to cloud computing. Here's why he's right, and why open standards for data portability are key in the cloud.

As Asay notes:

"Syncing is critical to making the mobile revolution work. And the nebulous cloud will become the anchor point for our mobile data, with the nodes (Android, iPhones, laptops, etc.) in a constant state of flux."

All of us are syncing more and more data to and from the cloud, and the number of devices we're doing it with is on the rise. Going forward, syncing strategies that aren't purely open will be at a disadvantage to ones that are.

For really important business data, I expect that many businesses will have redundant ways of managing and storing data--doing so both locally and on hosted services and storage platforms. It's also true that businesses will have redundant "faces" that they present in the cloud, with both private and public cloud services that they use and offer. Lock-in strategies for data portability will create increasing headaches as all of this plays out.

On that topic, Dana Blankenhorn makes several good points:

"We have come a long way from last year’s debate over an Open Cloud Manifesto. We have come a long way in terms of the market. We have traveled less distance in terms of the debate. Until open source advocates agree on what open means in terms of the cloud, clouds will evolve in ways that give lip service to open as an ideal, but still enforce vendor lock-in."

There are signs that players such as Microsoft and VMware remain quite focused on proprietary lock-in strategies in the cloud. In the end, we may look to pure open source players such as Eucalyptus Systems to really illustrate the perils of lock-in strategies in the cloud. In fact, cloud players focused on open standards are already making a difference.