Limited Portability Between Cloud Providers

Due to a lack of established industry standards within the cloud computing industry, public clouds are commonly proprietary to various extents. For cloud consumers that have custom-built solutions with dependencies on these proprietary environments, it can be challenging to move from one cloud provider to another.

Portability is a measure used to determine the impact of moving cloud consumer IT resources and data between clouds (Figure 1).

Figure 1 – A cloud consumer’s application has a decreased level of portability when assessing a potential migration from Cloud A to Cloud B, because the cloud provider of Cloud B does not support the same security technologies as Cloud A.