CLOUD BARRIER 5: Lack of standards
It is a paradox that standards should solve a number of existing migration challenges, yet some experts believe that adopting them too rapidly might damage the market.
That scenario happened with web services, which had promised an easy means of linking disparate systems. The politicking of vendors, each desperate to protect their own interests, led to the creation of complex standards that have made web services tricky to use. Thus the standards have broadly failed in the one thing they set out to do — support interoperability. They are starting to be eroded by simpler approaches such as Representational State Transfer.
As Vuk Trifkovic, a senior analyst at Datamonitor, points out: "There's a general agreement that standards are, for the most part, good and promote adoption at many levels. But there's also the worry that if you rush in too soon, you can get bogged down in a process that ends up being compromised. The market needs to develop to a point where it can benefit, and that's a couple of years away yet."
But initiatives such as the Open Cloud Manifesto have raised eyebrows, not least due to its call for interoperability and portability standards at the back-end infrastructure and platform level, rather than at the service level, which is what most users are likely to care about.
Back-end focus
However, the particular danger of focusing on the back end rather than services, according to Daryl Plummer, a vice-president at Gartner's emerging trends group, is that "standards just for the cloud infrastructure will not solve the biggest problems of the cloud model". These problems include remediation, disaster recovery, data ownership rights, legal responsibilities between service providers and how to broker aggregations of cloud services.
Therefore, although it seems likely that cloud migration standards will emerge at some point, their absence is unlikely to slow down the development of the industry for at least another two or even three years.
Indeed, as Gary Barnett of The Bathwick Group concludes: "Rather than fret about lock-in or whatever at this point, it seems more important to get things right. And that's about balancing the risk against the cost of backing out of one cloud relationship and moving to another.
"It's like a marriage — you get locked in and it's expensive to get out of if things go wrong, but everyone has to take equal responsibility if that's the case."
