Despite the flexibility of cloud computing, it should not beassumed that cloud products offered by any of the above ser-vices are likely to work out-of-the-box (i.e., they are not purelyplug-and-play). In some cases they might. Messaging and collabo-ration cloud products such as Google Apps are perhaps examplesof those out-of-the-box products, even though they still requiresome level of configuration nevertheless. Some degree of devel-opment (i.e., programming) will be required through the use ofthe cloud providers’ APIs (application programming interfaces).1These are the programming instructions created and offered bythe cloud service providers to those who want to access thefunctionality of their products. Currently, many of those APIsare proprietary. This is an issue which will be explored laterwhen examining some of the limitations and concerns of cloudcomputing.