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By Michael Eggebrecht
As enterprise adoption of cloud computing gains momentum, CIOs will need to take a firmer stance with cloud providers, says Brian Ott, VP of the worldwide cloud program at Unisys. When a vendor dictates the format of its customers' data, CIOs lose control -- and get locked in. Cloud brokerage services may be one way to get that control back.
A growing number of industry observers are pointing at vendor lock-in as a big risk in the current cloud landscape, and groups like the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum have been popping up as the focus on cloud standards grows. Late last year, the European Network and Information Security Agency cited lock-in as a major concern for potential cloud implementers.
"Standards have been a hot topic for about a year now," says Ott. "Lots of alliances formed a year ago, lots of people have been talking about the importance of standards, committees formed, groups formed -- both in the federal as well as the commercial space."
The industry is close to agreeing on the Open Virtualization Format, an open standard for virtual appliances, says Ott, who calls that format an important piece in enabling the cloud. But in terms of actual cloud standards, progress has been slow. And that has been causing concern for IT executives who are beginning to eye the public cloud.
"If you pick the wrong vendor and they aren't really open, you're locked in for some window of time," says Ott. "We've also seen the importance of that in the criteria for selecting the cloud provider. It used to not even be on the list, and now it's come up to at least the top ten."
Unisys, which marked the launch of its public cloud platform in July and rolled out a private cloud offering in November, is one of several companies that is looking to ease IT departments' concerns with a relatively new approach -- cloud computing brokerage.
Ott likens the Unisys service, which is due later this year, to a service-oriented architecture for the cloud. Unisys' hybrid cloud broker will put an application programming interface on top of a cloud provider's APIs, he says, allowing a customer to translate formats from one to another and move its workload to the target cloud environment.
Users will be able to move their data between a private cloud and various public clouds, notes Ott, "and really abstract the management of the complexity of that to where you don't have to have hard-coded APIs or direct network-to-network communication to move the workloads around and manage them with the appropriate formats."
Last summer, research firm Gartner identified cloud brokerage as an IT area slated for big growth. "It's unlikely that consumer organizations or individuals will be able to provide the data integration, process integrity or intermediation needed to bring multiple services together," said Gartner. So brokers -- including companies like Vordell and RightScale -- will be needed to help ensure that data is correctly modeled and integrated across the component services, and ensure the security of the information as it moves around.
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