No single answer to the great cloud conundrum

Vendor lock-in is as complicated as you want it to be, say Michael O'Reilly and Martin Blackburn

Insights

In association with NTT DATA

There can be little doubt for many organisations cloud adoption is a destination on a journey with many choices to make along the way. As IT professionals, we serve our business stakeholders to leverage cloud technology to deliver more efficient and innovative solutions that give a competitive advantage. To support this demand, cloud vendors present a cornucopia of ready-made components to entice customers to use their cloud. While these features accelerate cloud adoption and time to market, they also represent a potential for vendor lock-in.

Lock-in is familiar to the industry but represents a problem for cloud technology consumers. Do I align with a cloud vendor and take advantage of their investment in technology to accelerate my innovation strategy?

Many cloud vendors make it very easy to leverage their native components to build a custom solution and get it to market relatively quickly. While this is very attractive, are you at risk of tying yourself to these components and essentially lock-in to that vendor?

The alternative is to build the solution with an appropriate layer of separation to make the application cloud agnostic, giving you the flexibility to move cloud but at the cost of increased complexity. Therein lies the conundrum.

Cloud solutions can evolve in a Darwinian way where survival of the fittest is at play. It is common for cloud vendors to retire or replace services that have become outdated, replaced by newer, more robust technologies or simply lack end user demand. The last place you want to be is the only person using a solution component on the verge of extinction.

Potential Cloud lock-in can be view as two main types. The first type, ‘light lock-in’ is characterised by the use of cloud-native management, monitoring, automation and security tools. As a result moving cloud vendor could require switching vendor tools or alternatively leveraging cloud agnostic tools. For an example we can look to Microsoft’s retirement of Azure Service Manager on 1 September 2023, after which customers will have to migrate to Azure Resource Manager.

The second type, ‘heavy lock-in’, is differentiated by the use of cloud-native platform services, Web apps, cognitive services, and databases. Here, IT departments face significant refactoring of applications leveraging cloud-native platform capabilities. To see this in action we can point to Google’s retirement of its Cloud IoT Core service on 16 August 2023 requiring customers to migrate to an alternative service.

Choice

The choices you make when dealing with the cloud will have positive and negative long-term consequences, but awareness of these consequences will help you manage the lock-in conundrum. Consider the following as part of the strategy for managing, if not avoiding, lock-in:

• Avoid proprietary services: Refrain from using proprietary services as much as possible, as these services may be difficult to migrate or integrate with other cloud vendors.
• Choose open source technologies as much as possible: Open source technologies provide more flexibility and reduce the risk of being locked into one provider’s proprietary technology.
• Use cloud-agnostic tools and services: Select tools and services that can work across multiple cloud vendors. These tools and services enable the seamless transition of applications and services to other cloud providers with minimal changes.
• Implement a hybrid cloud environment: Leverage a hybrid cloud environment with multiple vendors to quickly move workloads and applications from one cloud to another.

NTT DATA support for hybrid cloud has encouraged building portability to solutions and helping avoid lock-in. The combination of leveraging open source technology and implementing cloud-agnostic tools gives you maximum choice when working within a multi-cloud ecosystem and dealing with cloud lock-in.

However, there are times when cloud lock-in could represent an advantage. Where time to market and value proposition of the cloud aligns with your organisational goals, then the benefits can outweigh any concerns. The point is to map out your decision process, understand the consequences, and go in with your eyes open when leveraging any solution cloud or otherwise.

Michael O’Reilly is EMEA chief technology officer with NTT DATA. Martin Blackburn is senior director, cloud practice, NTT DATA.

Do you have an open relationship with your cloud partner?

Service providers want to do more than sell solutions, they want to create ecosystems. New features, different pricing models, and ease of data portability all play a role in bringing in customers but what happens if you want to move to a competitor? TechFire, in association with NTT DATA, looks at the work required to keep your options open.

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