What is Cloud Vendor Lock-in and How You Can Avoid it?

With a massive growth in computing needs, enterprises consider cloud services as an opportunity to unburden themselves from the job of maintaining their own IT infrastructure and software platforms. The benefits of public cloud services are recognized by SMEs and large enterprises and thus, they are migrating from their on-premise infrastructure to cloud. 

After moving your infrastructure to the cloud, did you ever try moving to a different cloud service provider? If yes, then at some point, you must have come across one of the major impediments to cloud service adoption, i.e. vendor lock-in. Cloud Vendor lock-in is a circumstance where the clients become reliant (or get locked-in) onto a single cloud supplier and cannot move easily to another vendor without substantial price, technical incompatibility, or legal limitations.

The inability to freely lift and change the information and IT workload from 1 cloud Vendor to the next, amid the climbing competition amongst the vendors, problems the enterprise, which makes them search for a remedy to take care of vendor lock-in situations. Being in a position to deal with lock-in situations allows maximizing the total cost and operation of the infrastructure and software programs.

However, how can businesses ensure they don’t get in the cloud vendor lock-in situation? The latter section of the site shares a couple of ideas that could help avoid vendor lock-in scenarios.

Wise Vendor Selection 

Among the most usual and precautionary tactics to prevent vendor lock-in situations is to decide on the vendor sensibly in the first place. When you select a cloud supplier, be certain you browse the supplier’s coverage or inquire how they ease moving a client’s information from the repository. Additionally, you can check to find the resources and services which the service supplier offers to ease data migration.

You might even consult with a cloud tech specialist to understand which cloud service supplier will work well for your company. Our cloud specialists thoroughly examine a company and help them pick the best service depending on their enterprise size, funding, performance requirements, etc.

Evaluate Vendor’s Exit Terms 

While making vendor selection, it is important to assess a cloud vendor’s exit term. When you set an agreement with the cloud provider, check out their SLA to understand how they manage data and application migration. This is important in scenarios if a vendor terminates the service, or in the worst-case scenario, it goes out of business. 

Create a Multi-Cloud Strategy 

Understand that there’s not any 1 size that fits all. A service that works for one company may not work for another. Therefore, it’s an excellent concept to assess many vendors and decide on the best of the services concerning performance and cost.

In the majority of the circumstances, small-sized organizations are somewhat more vulnerable to vendor lock-in scenarios since they rely upon a single cloud support supplier for their requirements. That’s the reason why a multi-cloud plan is thought to be among the most effective approaches to handle cloud vendors lock-in.

Build Apps with Open Standards

Most of the cloud vendors support industry standards and compliances for application development infrastructure management. When apps are built using standards, switching between different cloud vendors becomes comparatively easier. In contrary scenarios, heavy customizations are required at a later stage of migration, resulting in vendor lock-in. 

Consider a Loosely Coupled Architecture

To diminish the risk of vendor lock-in, the applications should be developed with loosely coupled components. This ensures that part of an application or a service can be moved to another cloud provider, without affecting the functioning of the entire application. For example, you can go for microservices cloud applications wherein it is possible to move certain services to a different vendor, without affecting the entire application. 

Implement Modern Development Strategies

To optimize code reliability, a range of DevOps programs are used. Just consider the container technologies such as Docker or even CoreOs. They isolate the application programs from their surroundings and subjective dependencies from cloud suppliers.

Then There are configuration tools like puppet or chef which simplifies the procedure for configuring the infrastructure to run the programs. Consequently, applications can be set up in a diverse IT environment, decreasing the complexities of transferring to some other cloud supplier.