While there are benefits to hosting with a hyperscaler, there are growing concerns over cloud concentration risk, and large-scale cyber attacks potentially taking out an organization’s entire infrastructure. To mitigate this risk, you may be looking to keep your options open and spread your IT requirements across different service providers to improve redundancy and balance risk. However, the tactics employed by some hyperscalers can effectively trap you into solely using their infrastructure – an issue known as vendor lock-in.
So, what causes vendor lock-in, and how can your organization avoid becoming locked in to one provider?
Why vendor lock-in happens, and why it’s a problem
Many of the larger scale and legacy IT companies have encouraged their customers to become increasingly dependent on a single provider model. There are several tactics which lead to vendor lock-in, including system incompatibility, complex migration processes, and fees for data transfer.
Many hyperscalers make their technologies incompatible with other systems. Data, sites and applications then cannot be easily migrated to an alternative platform, and instead may require extensive refactoring. This makes it difficult and costly for organizations to switch provider or diversify their infrastructure later down the line.
Cloud egress fees and data transfer fees mean the cost to fully or partially migrate to an alternative vendor can be expensive. Many of the major cloud providers have now stated that they have ended their egress fees, partially due to anti-competitive behavior campaigns. However, on closer inspection, there are qualifications and conditions around their policies which can mean you are still hit with fees if you choose to migrate data.
How can you avoid vendor lock-in?
Initial planning
One of the biggest oversights that can leave an organization locked-in with a single vendor is a lack of planning in the initial stages of a deployment or migration.
Before you begin contacting cloud providers, you should thoroughly research your options to ensure they will be able to meet your needs now and in the future. If the platform meets your needs, you will be less likely to migrate away later down the line.
You should also investigate your potential provider’s policies around migration, exit fees, and system compatibility. Once you have gathered this information, you will be in a position to assess the risk of vendor lock-in and make an educated decision on whether to proceed.
Exit plan
Even once all the research is out of the way, it is still important to have an exit plan should you want to switch vendor or diversify your infrastructure in the future. To protect your organization, you should have a detailed plan in place when signing contracts with your chosen provider. This should include the option to easily and cost-effectively migrate data out and to a new provider if the need arises.
Diversification
An increasingly popular strategy is for organizations to opt for a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud approach that combines different types of infrastructure – on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud – allowing them to reap the benefits of each without compromise. For this reason, organizations could consider multiple cloud providers to ensure the best service for each need, such as backup, computing and disaster recovery. For details, read our insight on hybrid cloud vs multi-cloud.
This sort of approach should also be paired with keeping applications as flexible as possible and distributed across vendors.
Flexibility
Reconfiguring applications to run on a new platform is time consuming and expensive. But using open platforms, such as Docker containers, means you can isolate software and have them running on top of the infrastructure. They are also easy to relocate and rebuild, which saves a lot of hassle if and when you decide to move over to a new provider. Configuration management tools can also be utilized to automate the configuration of your infrastructure.
Management
Third-party management of your cloud infrastructure can support you to avoid vendor lock-in. A managed service provider (MSP) can provide a management layer on top of your infrastructure hosted with a hyperscaler, and can support you with configuration, deployment, ongoing management and migration as required. This expert management can help you avoid many of the potential causes of lock-in, as well as diversifying your list of providers.
How can Hyve support you to avoid vendor lock-in?
We take a vendor-agnostic approach, working with the top providers for each element of our hosting services.
We additionally support multi-cloud and hybrid cloud approaches, and will work with you to build the infrastructure that best suits your needs, with any combination of environments.
Unlike many providers, we do not have hidden fees to lock you into our services. We can support you moving away from a hyperscaler if required, advising you on the best migration strategy and taking into account any technologies only compatible with your current provider.
Our management services can cover all elements of your infrastructure, including managing your public cloud platforms if required. This gives you all of the benefits of a diverse infrastructure to avoid vendor lock-in, but with the ease of Hyve managing all elements, so you don’t have to manage this in-house.
We put your needs first, and will not trap you into platforms and technologies that do not work for you.
If you’d like to talk to one of our cloud hosting experts about how to get the most from your hosting, fill out our contact form.
