'Going to the cloud' could also mean locking into a forever sub-contractor

Summary

The very brief version: “going to the cloud” can mean renting services/servers that you could get from anywhere. There’s little lock-in. The same four words “going to the cloud” might also mean locking your operations to a specific cloud provider, whose proprietary services will now be part of your business processes “forever”. Be specific which variant of cloud you are signing off on! I’m mostly out of the office but this post was already in the pipeline and I thought it might be useful to get it out. Also, as usual, a very warm thank you to the many proofreaders who provided many valuable insights and corrections! The brief version: Software was previously deployed on servers, then on virtual servers, then on rented virtual servers. We are now massively taking what seems like the next logical step: getting “locked-in to the cloud”, where organizations base their services not just on servers but ever more on powerful non-standard proprietary third party cloud services. This however is not a simple next step, it is a fundamental change. From hereon the cloud provider’s unique intellectual property is an integral part of the services and products that operators provide. These cloud services are not standardized or interchangeable. These are not just databases. They are not some kind of electricity grid or water supply where you can just pick new vendors. Used this way, the cloud is not just replaceable hardware. The operator’s services are then deeply intertwined with specific cloud software that operators then have to rent forever. The cloud thus becomes an eternal subcontractor. The upside of this is that we can use much more specialized developers that don’t need knowledge of things like servers, storage, databases or the finicky internet things required to get users to sign on and log in safely. Also, many of the cloud building blocks may get providers to their destination a lot faster, and perhaps even more safely. But the downside is that operators don’t “own” ...