What Is Data Portability?

Data portability is the ability to take your data with you. It's like the "take your kid to work day" of the digital world, except that your data gets to go, not your kid. The idea here is that if you have data in one place, you should be able to take it with you wherever you want it. If you take your data from Microsoft Excel and put it into a Google spreadsheet or vice versa, you can do that without starting from scratch or losing any of your work. When we talk about portability in this context, we're talking about how easy it is for people to move their data between databases and IT environments. Data portability is a hot topic these days. It's the idea that you can take your data and keep it when you switch to a new company or move from one cloud provider to another. Data portability concerns are also common when it comes to moving data between two different cloud providers. In these cases, there is usually a need for a third-party solution to help bridge this gap between providers and enable seamless data transfer between them. You may have heard about data portability in healthcare records: when you change doctors or insurance companies, your health history should also be portable. This concept is much broader than that. It's also relevant if you're moving from one cloud provider to another or if you're trying to move your data from an on-premises server to a public cloud solution like Google Cloud Storage. Of course, it's not always easy for companies to offer data portability because it requires them to make their systems compatible with other products and platforms, which takes time and money! Yet if a company offers this feature, it can help consumers feel confident about where they put their trust in storing their most valuable information.