Data Portability: Key to Cloud Portability and Interoperability

Abstract

The Cloud brings new opportunities for governments to develop and deploy efficient and compelling citizen services, unlock the potential of the public domain data, as well as reduce costs for ICT services. Even for a new technology like Cloud, however, interoperability and portability is a key topic of discussion for government policy makers, both as a tool to reduce integration costs, as well as to reduce dependence on large ICT vendors. Cloud computing has potential to transform computing into a service-based model, where cloud service providers build cloud systems, and the majority of the users become the “consumers” of such services. In this changing dynamics of the computing industry, cloud service providers become increasingly more responsible for making sure that individual components of hardware and software are working together to provide the service promised to the customer in the service level agreement (SLA). In context of this fundamental shift, governments have to invest relatively fewer resources on the “systems interoperability” as the burden of getting software and hardware to work together shifts towards the cloud service providers rather than the consumer. While systems interoperability becomes the primary domain of the cloud service provider, issues around data interoperability still remain important, and perhaps even critical, as government data becomes increasingly contained with the systems provided through the cloud service provider. The issue of cloud portability is important to governments, as they want to ensure that customers can switch cloud service providers without unreasonable switching costs. Inevitably when a customer changes the cloud service provider, it is reasonable to assume that there will be a certain amount of switching costs. However, from a cloud portability perspective, it also becomes critical that data is sharable between cloud providers, since without the ability to port data, it would become simply impossible to switch cloud service providers at all. Policies need to be crafted around data interoperability related issues to ensure that data interchange between cloud services is un-hindered, as most government users will likely use heterogeneous cloud service providers for their needs. Policy makers will have to focus on data ownership and control issues to ensure that they continue to control the destiny of their data. Government policy makers should prioritize discussions on “data in the cloud” to ensure key requirements around data ownership, portability, standards, security and privacy are well understood, and cloud service providers are transparent around these issues in the SLA discussions.