Are We Really Concerned with Public Cloud Vendor Lock-in?
Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend Cloud Field Day 2, out in Silicon Valley. Cloud Field Day 2 brought a group of industry thought leaders together to speak with companies about their cloud products and stories. I was a little surprised to hear a reoccurring theme from some of the product vendors, which was: customers being so worried about being trapped by a public cloud vendor. Is It True? Based on my cloud consulting job, I can say that yes, many times customers are a bit worried about being locked in by a public cloud vendor. But most times this isn’t a crippling fear of being locked in, just a concern that they’d like to mitigate against if possible. But it’s like most things in the industry, you pick a valued partner and move forward with a strategy that makes sense for the business based on the information you know right now and a bet against the future. When virtualization was a new thing, I don’t recall that many conversations about making sure that both vSphere and Hyper-V were both in use in the data center so that lock-in could be prevented. We picked the partner that we saw had the most promise, capabilities, and price and built our solutions on top of those technologies. It’s still like that today, where you’ll pick a hardware vendor and attempt to prevent having multiple vendors because it increases the complexity of your services. You wouldn’t want to hire more people so that you can support two platforms, you’d want to hire the right employees to operate your corporate vision. ...