Another Cloud Bites the Dust
By brian | September 14, 2010 | Open Source
Another Cloud Bites the Dust…Yes another cloud’s gone, yes another cloud has gone…
I’m sure this is the last song that any business owner wants to hear when they have come to depend on a particular application in the cloud. But this is the reality of running apps on someone else’s server. If that server gets turned off because the business decides to shut its doors, then you are probably going to lose all of your data.
But you have backups, right? Well, what good are these backups if your provider goes belly up and doesn’t give you a copy of the software to run in case they can no longer run it on their servers?
This is exactly what happened last week with workflowperfect – a cloud solution for workflow that got its plug pulled. Nobody knows how or why as is usually the case when a business becomes insolvent. Many of their partners are now recommending our open source workflow software and open source bpm software as the solution. So, why would our particular workflow software be any different?
The answer is simple – when you run an open source software application in the cloud, you always have the ability to download a copy of the software and run it on your own servers. This is the beauty of open source – you can always get the code.
There is a dirty little secret about the cloud that gets very little airtime, but which is now beginning to surface. The fact is that it is incredibly easy to start a cloud application software-service. There are no up front hardware costs anymore, and usage can be paid for by the minute. Writing software is easier every day and there are plenty of low cost options to do so. But the fact is, when the barriers to entry are this low, more and more people tend to enter the market with little or no planning. Since so little capital is no needed to start many of these services, most people think that they can simply skip the step of writing a business plan. Ah, if it were only that easy.
So, yes, I believe this will become a much more frequent ocurrence. And with more and more cloud application companies disappearing from one day to the next – shouldn’t you protect yourself and know that you’ll have access to the code if your provider stops running its servers? If you can’t run on open source software, then at the very least insist that your provider puts its software in escrow – this will offer you some additional protection.
