The Cloud Lock-In (Part 3): SaaS is Really Nice

This is the third and last post in regarding the cloud lock-in. In the first and the second parts I covered the vendor lock-in of IaaS and PaaS. The appealing registration and the low cost overwhelm the new SaaS consumers that often makes them forget that eventually the service will become something they just can’t live without. What will happen if one day your SaaS vendor goes out of business ? In this post I will try to cover the threats and the actions the enterprise should take in order to lower the level of the SaaS lock-in risk.
>  >  >  How does the lock-in of a SaaS application differ from a traditional on-premise application?
SaaS use is actually the consumption of servers, operating systems, middle ware, network connections and more. Switching a SaaS vendor is much simpler as these are not located in your site – shifting to another vendor mainly includes migration of the data without the hassle of ripping and replacing the full app stack. This cheerful answer also provides a less costly and less complex switch than the painful effort and the risky investment of moving an on-site software.
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The IaaS Management Market: Evolution, Vendors and More

A lot has already been said about the false cloud use where the IaaS platform utilized as an hosting extension of the IT organization’s data center and not taking advantage of the elasticity benefits to generate a cost effective and scalable IT operation. Using the public IaaS whether it is Amazon, Rackspace or any other vendor means using a highly dynamic environment which presents an increasing complexity hence loss of control. Checking the list below I can say that cloud (including all its layers IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) control basically contains the same aspects as the good old system management.

What is “System management” ?
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Giants' Faith in the Cloud

“The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies.” (Napoleon Bonaparte) Microsoft - ״Last week,…

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Amazon Outage: Is it a story of a conspiracy?

Last week my Twitter blinked massively by news magazines and cloud blogers that reported on the extraordinary news: “The cloud computing crashed”. Amazon AWS had suffered a major outage in its US East facility. This was the worst in cloud computing’s and Amazon’s history. This failure affected major sites such as Heroku, Reddit, Foursquare, Quora and many more well-known internet services hosted on EC2. From what I read, it seems that automated processes began replicating a large number of EBS volumes, which harmed EBS performance and availability across multiple availability zones in north Virginia region.

“..However badly they’ve been affected, providers have sung Amazon’s praises in recognition of how much it’s helped them run a powerful infrastructure at lower cost and effort.” Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage (ZDNet SaaS Blog)

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Gartner: IaaS forecast to grow from an estimated $3.7 billion in 2011 to $10.5 billion in 2014

“Startup IaaS pure-plays, Web hosters, carriers and data center outsourcers are all competing in the cloud computing IaaS market. However, many providers have a market viewpoint that is restricted by…

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5 Amazon AWS Cloud Deployment and Management Tools

Cloud-managementAdopting the cloud  must come with a management solution strategy. Cloud Management refers to all cloud environment aspects and their related tasks. Tasks include deploying, monitoring, analyzing and more. Many IT organizations today running to adopt the new disruptive cloud methodologies. Choosing to run a business on a cloud is a strategic decision, picking the right way to orchestrate your cloud resources should be an integral part of your cloud adoption strategy.
I asked Amazon support:

“I am looking for a tool that will let the ISV’s customers an option to enable an environment by themselves with a back office for its administrator to control the different customer accounts. For example for an e-learning environment that also includes rules such as the total hours enabled for a single formation/cluster that support a few hours class a day”.
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