Here’s the view from a recent from flight westward to San Francisco. A lot of clouds outside my window are reminding me that I need to update my blog.

By now we all know the benefits associated with cloud – pay-as-you-go model, greater agility, reduced complexity – and we’ve also heard some discussion on perceived risks such as vendor “lock in”, data security and reliability.

While these concerns are well founded, I strongly believe they will all be overcome in time. We’ve certainly been here before.

Competition has fueled an industry revolution over the last 30 years. Competition has been a catalyst for innovation, and that innovation has given us – the user – the power to choose.

Helping speed innovation and adding to the myriad choices across the technology stack are interoperability and standards. These concepts are prevalent in the hardware space and are good for suppliers and consumers.

For example, I can buy a laptop and extend its life by adding memory and hard drive, while manufacturers can find the best supplier for the best price. None of this would be possible without interoperability.

Unfortunately on the software side we have not made enough progress in this area. All too often vendors wrestle each other on the standards bodies as a way to promote their corporate agenda or market their brand or platform as opposed to prioritizing the work based on key use cases and customer representation. What I often hear from IT organizations, is that they fear choosing an external supplier for a SaaS or PaaS offering will result in vendor lock in. That’s a very real concern for customers and an issue that BMC is taking seriously.

More work has to be done to ensure the customer retains the right to choose. As I mentioned in a previous blog, the right to choose is essential to a successful cloud implementation.

Concerns about data security and reliability are genuine but not unsolvable. In fact most of us use off-premise services for mission critical and confidential collaboration or communication all the time.

Millions of very confidential meetings are hosted on Web conferencing services like Cisco’s WebEx or Microsoft Live Meeting every day. Whether it’s a customer support call or demonstrating our latest products, we rely on Web conferencing for many aspects of our business, and the reliability of the service is critical part of our business.

We trust Web conferencing to work when we need it and often take it for granted. And like all critical business services, when something goes wrong, it can result in a fire drill or even lost revenue.

Now for a shameless plug on a related topic. Please join me for an on-demand webinar on cloud, compliance and virtualization. We’ll be discussing some of the topics in this post and many others, alongside industry leaders from InstallFree, Global Data Systems, and Infinite Group.

Please click the link below to register:

http://www.bmc.com/events/on-demand/Cloud-Compliance-and-Virtualization-Industry-Panel-Webinar.html

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.