What? ... Cloud options restrictive and costly?

Now who would of thought.

US ​Government Accountability Office (GAO) finds restrictive software licenses associated with commercial cloud contracts have resulted in increased costs and limited choices in service providers.

The GAO analyzed six randomly selected Department of Defense (DOD) programmes based on fiscal year 2023 budget size and grouped the investments into three groups — greater than $100 million, between $100 million and $10 million, and between $10 million and $1 million, with key findings that vendors:

• limited the ability to migrate the department’s software obtained through pre-existing, traditional commercial software licenses to cloud computing;
• established terms and conditions that limited DOD access to previous versions of software;
• established terms and conditions that impeded the department’s use of specific software by requiring compatibility with specific versions of software from other vendors;
• limited software available for cloud computing in certain commercial markets where the vendor had significant market share;
• restricted DOD’s use of software to the vendor’s proprietary cloud or a limited number of competitor cloud solutions;
• prevented DOD from operating software on specific cloud platforms; and
• sold software that met DOD requirements only in packages with other software not needed to meet requirements.

Not a good story, although no doubt a common one that, given CIO's and CTO's relentless push to the cloud in recent times, (fully endorsed by doe-eyed executive committees and boards clambering to chat that 'yes, we're doing that too') are unlikely to get air time in that respect - just glowing reports of progress and ever increasing (perhaps slowly)  'number of migrated applications' statistics.

Now we're not saying there is no place for the cloud - there is - but per the recommendations of the GAO from this report, it needs to be formulated through guidance and plans that fully address identifying, analyzing, and mitigating the impacts of restrictive software licensing practices on cloud computing efforts.

And therein is the problem. Many CIO's and CTO's would rather rely on vendors or consultants recommendations rather than their own in-house expertise across IT, SAM and procurement teams who know in detail what - and where - costs and impacts are likely to arise.

So if nothing else, perhaps try to use the GAO's Examples of Reported Restrictive Software License Practices table below as a minimum checklist of what to consider with your next cloud migration programme - it might bring some future issues to light and maybe even save just a little grief! 

---