(An addendum to "Increasing Freedom and Confidence in Software as a Service")
A number of initiatives respond to customer worries and aim at providing users with more assurance and more control over the behavior of cloud services. These ideas1 broadly include:
Providing standard formats and APIs to help clients remove their data from SaaS services2
Releasing the source code for the servers and applications that run SaaS web sites3
Providing open standards for cloud services, to facilitate competition and portability4
Legal assurances to protect the integrity and privacy of client data5
Peer-to-peer architectures for social networks and other services that are commonly offered from centralized locations6
All of these are valuable and provide pieces of the solution, but we must also go further.
1Tio Libre Definitions (no longer online)
3 Affero General Public License
4 Cloud Foundry; OpenStack: Open source software for building private and public clouds; CloudAudit and the Automated Audit, Assertion, Assessment, and Assurance API (A6)
Andy Oram is an editor at O’Reilly Media. This article represents his views only.
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