One of the things you get used to as a consumer of services is that at times changes to the terms and conditions of that service irritate you and you consider moving your custom. Most of the time you don’t and eventually you learn to live with the changes. Actually, most of the times, the changes don’t make a jot of difference and you are just irritated for the sake of being irritated.
As consumers of ‘cloud applications’; this happens to us a lot; Twitter changes something, we all howl, it generally stays changed and we learn to live with it. User-interfaces change underneath us all the time, we have no choice and we learn the new interface. We cannot opt-out.
Now, look around your data centre; how many applications have you got running on legacy hardware/operating systems which are long out of support and in some case, the company which built them no longer exists? As you own the infrastructure, you can simply take the decision to opt-out and continue to run the application. A Business Unit might have very good reasons for continuing to run the application but it could simply be the case of ‘It Aint Broke, So Don’t Fix It’.
If Cloud Infrastructures become the norm, this no longer becomes quite so tenable. If your Cloud Provider upgrades it’s underlying infrastructure and you find your instance no longer works; your only opt-out might well to be find a way of moving that instance into a infrastructure which will support it. However, if the application is core and lots of applications partner with it; this might not be easy.
For support teams, this might finally give them the stick they need to encourage maintenance of applications enabling them to upgrade but if you are running a private cloud infrastructure, you could find yourself in the position where you have legacy clouds…and that will just make things worse.
