“If you have your back-up and your disaster recovery with a different cloud provider, then you have access to your data in a different location if you need it.”
Motiviations
Oliver Surdival, managing director of Cloudstrong, recommends that before considering cloud migration, companies should use whatever dissatisfaction is driving the decision to make sure they do not make the same mistake twice.
“If you’re not happy with your current cloud provider, really understand why. Whatever that reason is, make a list of the things you’re happy about with your existing cloud provider and which they’re doing well, and whatever they’re not doing well and then use that as your benchmark when you look to other providers,” he said.
When interviewing potential cloud suppliers, Surdival insists it is important not just to talk to them, but to look for case studies and four or five different reference sites you can check out.
“We’ve had some small to medium sized companies moving from other providers to us who had various issues in terms of service or they were oversold in terms of expectations and then decided they weren’t happy. It’s not an easy process, not so much because of the costs involved, although there are costs, but in that it requires a lot of planning and organisation to move successfully,” he said.
The good news for companies contemplating a move is that the cloud industry as a whole is slowly becoming more competitive. For the past two years Interxion has commissioned research into the trends affecting the hosting and cloud industry throughout Europe and this year’s findings support the idea that that enterprise cloud adoption rates are quickly rising.
Reinvention
“We expect even faster adoption in the next years and on the back of that, we’re also seeing a recurring theme in how local European providers are responding to the changing competition and reinventing themselves, especially versus the global players,” said Tanya Duncan, managing director, Interxion.
According to Duncan, the research reveals a strategic shift by European cloud and hosting providers in the way they view their competitors.
“This year 37% of those surveyed viewed the global cloud platforms as their main market competition, compared to just 13% last year. Increasingly it seems it’s the large players that local European IT organisations are up against, and are developing to differentiate themselves,” she said.
According to Boyle of PFH, as the need for cloud migration services grow, the larger cloud providers have started to make a feature of their willingness to cooperate.
“The bigger cloud providers are making it obvious how you can leave because while they want you to stay, if they want your trust the smart ones know that they have to show how they can leave,” said Boyle.
“If you look at Microsoft Azure for example, you’ll find that for the last 10 or 11 months, you’ve been able to move a server seamlessly back on premise even if it’s Hyper-V to Hyper-V. And with the purchase of InMage, they’re going to make that possible for VMware as well.”
The logic is not hard to figure out. While it is better if a customer does not move on, what is going to create more stickiness in the long run – attempting to lock a customer in or allowing the market to decide?
“If you look at CRM, Microsoft has been cute enough because from a licensing perspective, it doesn’t care if your data is on-premise or not. You can seamlessly move your CRM system out of CRM online back to CRM on premise and if you take all your data out, it appears in an SQL database. That’s very attractive for larger scale customers concerned about lock-in,” said Boyle.
“Picture a sales meeting where a guy says ‘I’m going to have a level playing field and you’re going to want to deal with me because of my service capability, reliability and price,’ versus the next guy who says, ‘if you want to leave, we’d have to put a project in place to extract your data and it’ll involve this and that and we’ll give it back to you in XLS or delimited files.’ Who are you going to feel more comfortable with?”
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