Are the days of data lock-in really behind us?
To infer from this result, it appears the risk of dependency is a more significant barrier than data lock-in.
There would be no more personal data lock-in, and no more legal terms and condition shenanigans.
This seems counter intuitive considering the practical challenges associated with the data lock-in when extending the use of cloud in the enterprise.
Researchers from the RAD lab of UC Berkeley, for instance, have identified 10 specific concerns (i.e., availability, data lock-in, data confidentiality & auditability, data transfer bottlenecks, etc).
Creating an industry standard for data portability could force companies to compete on utility instead of being protected by data lock-in that traps users because it's tough to switch services.
As CEO, Aaron Levie wrote in a blog post announcing the partnership, "The days of closed IT architectures and data lock-in are over…" This deal is proof of that.
However, the probable explanation is that presently most organisations are too reliant on cloud providers for operational and technical support [47], thus they fail to fully prepare to deal with unexpected and undesirable data lock-in issues in the cloud (referring to Fig. 10).
FFForget is envisioned as a fix for the data lock-in issue — by providing a mechanism to free users of major social networking platforms from the fear of leaving their information behind should they decide to pull the plug and close their accounts.
The results in Fig. 8, highlights that besides the risks of data breach and cyber-attack, or failure to meet agreed service levels, UK businesses are also concerned about having corporate data locked-in to a single cloud provider.
