“Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you – not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you’re like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it’s also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all.” – Brian Fitzpatrick, Google Data Liberation engineering manager
Unfortunately, this imaginary situation in the real estate becomes a reality in the Cloud services industry. The manufacturers or providers of such services do whatever it takes to have users uploading their data into the cloud systems, but they do almost nothing when a user wants to leave that service in order for him to be able to download or move all his data from one cloud to another or on its own infrastructure.
So the Data liberation concept means that the user is not locked in when using an application in cloud (for example an ERP or other type of solution) and he has the freedom to take all his data and also the application from there whenever he wants and use it on his own infrastructure.
BITSoftware is a company which thinks that Data Liberation is a mandatory feature for a service based on Cloud Computing. It’s a facility that strengthens the trust and loyalty of existing customers and can attract new customers for which data availability is an essential factor.
Data Liberation is also a stimulus for the cloud computing services providers. If the users have more flexibility to leave the service, companies are forced to create products and services with increased quality.
In the actual context, when we talk about Cloud Computing, the above translates into a new paradigm:
Don’t lock in the users in a product or service, give them enough reasons to stay with you.
Finally, open is better than close, because when it’s easy for users to leave your product, there’s a sense of urgency to improve and innovate in order to keep your users. When your users are locked in, there’s a strong temptation to be complacent and focus less on making your product better.
That’s why it’s important for all providers and consumers of cloud services to understand what Data Liberation means and why it is important to respect the concept.
BITSoftware offers a Data Liberation service for SocrateCloud. Using this service, all SocrateCloud customers can download anytime their data from the cloud in a format that can be easily restored in their local environment.
SocrateCloud is an open business platform in cloud, including complete ERP, CRM and BI functionalities and the possibility to extend anytime the solution, developing new apps in order to cover custom industry needs.
More info regarding SocrateCloud functionality, extensions, apps and implementation can be found here.
