beware the host with handcuffs.

Byline: Martin De Saulles

beware the host with handcuffs

One of the characteristics of Web 2.0 services is their collaborative nature. Hosted on the web servers of a third-party provider, the wikis, blogs or files created by your organisation can be shared by colleagues dispersed across wide geographic areas.

The constraints of desktop and enterprise applications are slowly disappearing as more organisations start working in the "cloud" of internet applications. Never has it been so easy for individuals and small groups with little or no technical expertise to use collaborative tools for a range of activities.

But while the advantages of such services to users have been widely trumpeted, there is less consideration of the potential downside.

It is certainly easy to upload files and post information to blogs, wikis, social media and content management systems, but what happens when the organisation wants to take its data out of these systems? It may need to move the data for a number of reasons, such as archiving, backing up data or transferring over to another service. When an organisation's systems are its own this is relatively straightforward, but when the servers are controlled by an external company and the data is in a non-standard proprietary format, there could be a problem.

only game in town