How to avoid Cloud vendor lock-in

While the Cloud market has matured by quite a bit over the last few years, some concerns still keep companies from migrating. One of such fears is vendor lock-in. Even though Cloud brings tremendous benefits to business development, quite a number of CEOs is still reluctant to move because of vendor lock-in. Do these concerns have anything to do with reality, though? Or are they a relic of the bygone era of on-premises software when you experienced true lock-in? 

What is vendor lock-in?

Vendor lock-in occurs when you dedicate to one provider, leaving you in a tough spot in terms of further migration. Usually, the costs associated with switching to another supplier are higher than the benefits it would bring, leaving you stuck.

One might think that there's nothing wrong with using one provider, but your mileage may vary. See, if there's a decline in the quality of services and your infrastructure is provided by one company, then you'd have to replace all of the elements.

To mitigate that risk, businesses often go for diversified vendors. This ensures that, with a sudden drop in quality, they can simply replace the faulty component.

Such a strategy is often adopted when businesses, such as an online live casino or sports betting service, adopt Cloud strategy, as there's a number of other possible risks and concerns.

The most common cloud vendor lock-in concerns and risks

Dependence

The fact that your entire infrastructure is in the hands of one provider makes some CEOs shiver. Imagine the disaster that would happen if your systems had suddenly stopped working.

Decline of quality

The quality of Cloud services is not set in stone — it can be subject to constant fluctuation, even with the most prominent providers. At the beginning of your cooperation, all could be just fine, but a failure to meet your requirements might just as well happen.

Security

The risk of cyber-attacks and data breaches keeps increasing as more and more companies decide to keep their data online. On-premises software and diversified Cloud service providers are usually safer. 

Provider going out of business

While this is a concern that is mostly in regards to smaller providers, it's a risk that has to be taken into account. Natural disasters, sudden shifts in the market, and bankruptcies are genuine threats.

Change of the offer

Your provider could make a sudden shift in the scope of services they supply to make adjustments in accordance with the ever-evolving market. Reengineering of the solutions and business process changes are a real concern.

Migration price

With a single vendor, it's much more expensive to move or convert your data. Being locked into a single vendor with your whole infrastructure makes you more prone to the risk of unexpected pricing increase as well.

Lack of control

Compared to on-premises architecture, you have to give up control over your resources to a certain extent.

Still, these risks can be mitigated with particular strategies that your company can employ.

Strategies to avoid Cloud vendor lock-in and retain peace of mind

Adopt multi-cloud

Multi-cloud consists of dividing the elements of your Cloud infrastructure between multiple providers. While not all of them are keen on doing that, some are open to such a strategy. 

For example, you could have SaaS CRM, IaaS as your computing environment, and data storage coming from three different providers.

The division of dependence between more Cloud services allows you to quickly switch up one of the elements, should any of the risks as mentioned above came true. Multi-cloud adoption also lets you pick the providers that have the best price-to-quality ratio of specific services. See, some suppliers are better in one field than the other. 

Do proper due diligence

Due diligence consists of the assessment of a Cloud provider. A simple checklist involves first defining your goals and making an appraisal of available resources and then asking questions including:

• What are the security measures undertaken to make my data safe?
• Where and how will my data be stored?
• What's the uptime?
• What is the capacity: storage, transfer, simultaneous connections?
• How quick is the system in terms of allocating new data?
• What is the response time?
• What are the disaster recovery strategies?
• How are backups performed: number, location, retention period, methods, restoration?
• What are the specific costs?
• What are the terms and conditions?

While this is not really an exhaustive list of possible questions to ask, they're a pretty good starting point for due diligence.

Be upfront about the exit strategy

When discussing the entry strategy, go ahead and talk about exiting. While this may seem counterproductive to debate exiting immediately, it ensures that you know all of the possibilities in case you're unhappy with the service. 

Create loosely-connected applications

When developing your apps, don't make them reliant on a particular infrastructure all that much. If you manage to retain more neutrality, you'll be able to migrate to a different platform more conveniently. This also helps with the adoption of multi-cloud, should you decide to do so. The data you store within the platform should also be of easily portable formats which are compatible with any system. 

Keep internal backups

To feel extra-safe, you could go ahead and create on-premises backups of the data stored within the Cloud. While this might seem like overkill, it makes sure that your data is secure and easier to relocate. A strategy called hybrid-cloud, consisting of using a public Cloud provider and on-premises architecture, is a widely-used one among large enterprises.

Why Cloud vendor lock-in might not be so bad in the end

The fear of vendor lock-in stems from using outdated on-premises software. Issues with licensing were the most common concern of IT departments. The thing is, it was often incredibly tough to discern the specific conditions of a license. Now, with public cloud services, it's entirely avoided by measuring your usage per unit of data.

Regarding the previously mentioned risks, the current Cloud market is incredibly stable. Three main providers, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, lead the advancement of this technology. Instead of focusing on the infrastructure, unnecessarily diluting your attention, allocate your resources to app development. Cloud services are extremely reliable; all of them offering 99.99% uptime. There's nothing wrong with deciding to go with only one of them, as you'll be able to take advantage of all of the possible features, rather than using only a couple of them. 

Being Cloud-neutral comes with additional costs as well. Compared to the risk of the cost increase of a particular provider, it's simply not worth it. It has never happened. 

Conclusion

While adopting the strategies listed in this article is good overall practice, it should not be done out of fear of vendor lock-in. Currently, to develop innovative, cutting-edge applications, I'd say that it's advantageous to commit to one vendor. The largest enterprises are most often based on one provider's infrastructure, and they're doing just fine.