Andres Rodriguez, chief executive officer of Nasuni (www.nasuni.com), says:

Can you avoid vendor lock-in with cloud applications and services?

Yes. The cloud storage gateways are designed to give customer not only choice but practical way to migrate data between providers. For instance, Nasuni supports several of the major cloud providers and we have chosen to absorb transfer fees to make sure that our customers have the freedom not only to store multiple volumes with multiple providers, but also migrate data using a standard file system interface.

If you’re already tied, how can you protect yourself?

Most the major vendors today support bulk transfers whereby a customer can ask for all their data back in one large chunk. The data would in all likelihood be sent as tapes or disks. Customers should check to make sure the providers they are choosing to do business with have in the EULA a clear statement about how to get the data out. Then you can hold them to that.

Customers should also be wary of using vendors’ proprietary APIs to store their data. Each of these APIs are different and if your applications depend on it, it will only increase vendor-lock-in.