This is quite a long quote, but it tells the whole story of open vs proprietary standards:
“If you look at some of the key facets of cloud computing standards, they are not particularly mature. They are behind the times and they are always going to be behind the times. What we are seeing is that the vendors are moving faster than the standards bodies. What this results in is vendors are putting their own standards out there - vendor specific standards - in order to get certification. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but before you buy into a vendor standard, just think about what open standards are being developed. You may decide that you are happy to buy into a particular cloud vendor and you may decide that you aren't particularly worried about moving that service out if you are comfortable with the reliability being offered. But that's going to be the trade off.” - Paul Byons, BBC.
To drive the point home: the trade-off is about time. It's about whether you just get through today, or whether you spend today building a better tomorrow.
These are tough decisions to take. That's why they get taken high up in the organization. Decision makers can choose to lock themselves in – but they are obligated to know what they're getting into, why, and on what terms.
I'd add that on the experience of every technology wave to date, cloud vendors will in any case end up adopting common standards or fizzling out. Your vendor's attitude to standards down the road is therefore key even to consciously short-term decisions.
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