Appendix: Common Solutions to Lack of Freedom in the Cloud

(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)

² The Data Liberation Front

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)

⁵ Open Cloud Initiative

⁶ Jabber; Diaspora; Prophet

Andy Oram is an editor at O’Reilly Media. This article represents his views only.

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