Interoperability remains one of the key barriers to the adoption of cloud computing. As businesses, governments, schools and individuals move to the cloud, how can we be sure the data we store there doesn’t find itself quarantined, stuck in one format and out of the reach of other services?

As more and more companies are offering cloud storage capabilities (such as Oxygen, Nomadesk and Dropbox), do we need to have a standard API for data storage?
Will the major players in the industry – in the case of data storage, that’s arguably Amazon S3 – determine the standard? Or is cloud storage still too nascent for us to look for standardization?