There are many reasons not to move your data to the cloud. You might be concerned about the performance of your system, you might be concerned about the reliability of the service, you might worry about any number of regulatory or legal factors, or you might be worried about security. However I think most of those issues aren't as important as another one: moving your data.

I like the freedom to choose how I want to run my business. I like to be able to choose to run Oracle, or NoSQL, or SQL Server. I like to be able to purchase my hardware from Dell or HP or Apple. And more importantly, I like to be able to change my mind and move to a new vendor if they have a better product, or if the price saves me money, or if I just change my mind.

The ability to get my data back is critical to me. Despite all the triple redundancy of Azure and the backups avaible from AWS, I want to be able to move my data if the need arises. There are transfer options, but they might not work as well as expected. A test moving data from AWS to Azure didn't work as well as expected, which unfortunately, isn't surprising. Part of this may be Azure and not Amazon, which is a little disappointing.

I suspect that cloud companies would not be as helpful when you are closing your account as when you first sign up. They have no financial incentive to do so, but I would hope that they would act maturely, and let customers go if they cannot meet their needs. Our requirements may change,  and being able to get our data back is important. If you want to charge a fee to expedite the removal of data, state that up front, but make sure that we can get our data back.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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