What to do if your cloud provider disappears

The growing use of virtualization makes it relatively easy to move servers from a defunct cloud provider to a new platform, since the virtualized servers exist as files that can be moved among physical machines. Retrieving an application written to a specific cloud vendor's API or development platform, though, can be significantly more challenging.

Step 4: Prepare for application portability
The most difficult challenge in the cloud is porting your cloud-based applications if your provider goes bust. Porting an application to a new cloud platform may require access to the application runtime, the application's business logic, the database supporting the application, and the data your users have already entered into the application. The more proprietary the platform used by the cloud provider and the more of the application management done by the cloud provider, the harder it can be to port the application.

Salesforce.com, for example, boasts that that it frees customers from having to buy, manage, and install CRM software on their own hardware. Once they sign up, they can access Salesforce.com, and any customizations they have made to it, over any computer with a Web browser, as well as use hundreds of applications written to Salesforce's Force.com API via the Apex development language.

However, this highly proprietary model means customers can run only Salesforce.com (including any customization they have done to the pages they use within the application) on the Salesforce platform.

Yes, tools such as the Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex and the Google Gears APIlet developers use the Force.com API to create Web applications that can run offline. But although users can make changes to data in offline mode, most of these applications rely on regular synchronization with Salesforce.com for their database, business logic, and workflow capabilities. So you're still dependent on Salesforce.com.

Because Salesforce.com's Apex is Java-like, you may have "a fighting chance of porting it to another platform," says Ben Bloch, an independent technology consultant. It might be possible to reuse some logic, user interface, and other elements, but the developer would still have to redo a lot of work already conducted on the Salesforce platform, he says. This includes, he says, not only reconstructing the data required by the application but designing and implementing data and other models that describe the application and its data relationships.

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