Database Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Termination events - how to extract oneself from the agreement; avoiding lock-in
•
Intellectual property rights. To whom does the data belong? (Please see this excellent
paper for more details on cloud contract negotiation:
http://stlr.stanford.edu/pdf/
The major concern for me with Cloud is that I do not trust another company to
not
take advantage of me once
they have power over my critical systems. I have been involved with a number of companies that have entrusted
the software and database that represent critical components of their system to the cloud, then had legal issues
negotiating a fair rate and difficulty extricating themselves from the agreement.
Those among us who have been in IT for a while will remember GeoCities X drive functionality, which was
a remote network hard drive given free of charge at first. But after the files had been read by the supplier, and the
user had become used to the service, the drive became a chargeable service. GeoCities ultimately folded, but it was
a precursor to future aspects of cloud provision. GeoCities was a consumer service and small scale, but for large
business systems once cloud becomes integrated into the critical path then licensing negotiation could be a bit one
sided if the vendor has the ultimate power to pull the plug on a company's systems.
This same issue has played out in the software world. The growth of software escrow companies like NCC in the
United Kingdom, which have made good profit from holding copies of source code for commercial software “in trust”
as a third party for a software vendor and a user of that software, shows that this power balance is of great concern.
What does a large company do if their software supplier goes out of business or becomes unreasonable? The user of
the software has no recourse - unless a software escrow business can be the intermediary, thus ensuring fair play and
covering the eventuality of the software vendor going out of business.
The notion of escrow for cloud service provision is an interesting one. Will vendors like Oracle or Microsoft allow
for the safe storage of cloud source code in a third-party escrow vault? More to the point, how does one verify that it
is the running code? Perhaps the escrow solution is impractical for cloud, hence the growth of the cloud contract law
negotiation field previously discussed.
The other major concern that should be considered before migrating currently internal applications to a cloud
provider is the speed of the software. This is termed as
latency
. You must test the latency between a cloud provider
and the client systems. In my experience, the data center location has an enormous effect on how responsive the
network will be. As an example, Oracle's main competitor for cloud software provides much of its UK cloud services
from Dublin, Ireland, which results in a significant latency to mainland Britain. Oracle, on the other hand, when
supplying cloud services to central Europe, has deployed data centers to that local geographical location in order to
keep latency at a minimum.
Latency Testing
If you would like to measure latency on the desktop there is a handy tool freely available at this URL:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/network_latency_view.html
. It also includes free GeoIP tools. The easy-to-use
free GUI is shown in Figure
19-1
.
