Cloud and virtualization security course (information security)

- Discussion question -

Earlier in the course we mentioned cloud lock-in as a risk for moving to the cloud. This partly had to do with how, as a customer, you can retrieve your data from a cloud service should circumstances change and you decide to switch providers or bring the service in-house. The availability of data export tools can be an important feature offered by a cloud service provider. Google and Salesforce have mature offerings in this space and for cloud storage or backups the solution is obvious. But take a look around at other SaaS offerings (both personal and business services) and see what data export features they offer. Do they offer anything at all? If not, does the data you are expected to store with them worthy of export (i.e. is the data important enough to warrant saving or reusing elsewhere)? If so, does their data export feature seem like it would generate useful data you could move to a new service? Can you think of ways to improve what they currently have? Can you think of any strategies that an individual or an organization can take when putting their data in the cloud to protect against lock-in? Choose a SaaS service to examine and answer these questions for.