Get Off Of That Cloud

Storage vendors can box you in if you try to switch. How to avoid the data trap.

- Minda Zetlin

A decade ago, storing data in the cloud seemed risky. Today, cloud-based, software-as-a-service applications such as G Suite, Office 365, and Salesforce have made outsourcing data storage simple. But not risk-free. One big issue: With each of them, data is stored in a format that won’t work well outside that application. It can make switching from one to another tricky.

Just ask the Intern Group, a startup that places students in international internships. In 2016, the company consolidated its data. Some were in Google Sheets, some were in the customer-relationship management application Highrise, and some was in a second CRM app, Contactually. Intern Group wanted to consolidate within Vtiger, yet another cloud CRM app. Moving databases was hard enough—and then there were the emails. “We have partnerships with universities,” explains Kevin Harper, director of technology and operations. “Think about relationship building— there’s a long email history.”

Highrise returned those emails in an unusable form. “Every single email we ever had with a particular partner, we got it back in a one really long text file,” he says. Frustrated, Harper hired a developer to write code that would convert the emails into a usable format, which cost about $5,500. Next time, he says, he’ll find out in detail what will happen if Intern Group wants its data back before signing with any cloud software company.