When it Comes to the Cloud, is Agnosticism a Blessing?

It may not like the antithesis of choice, but is vendor lock-in necessarily that bad?

As with a lot of things, the short answer is that it depends.

Ever since the PC revolution helped usher in the age of client-server computing, companies have been loath to give up the freedom of choice that was denied them during the many decades when big mainframes dominated the scene. Since then, IT and line of business managers have rejected vendor lock-in as a terrible idea, arguing that it narrowed their flexibility and unnecessarily tied their organizations to the fate of a single technology supplier.

But does that conventional wisdom still apply in the cloud era?

Navigating the Gray Area

As a general rule, IT decision makers planning out their organization’s digital roadmaps, naturally, want as much choice as possible. When it comes to cloud deployment decisions, that would free them up to select a software-as-a-service offering from one vendor, and platform-as-a-service from another.

And more businesses are indeed demanding multi-cloud environments that let them run some combination of workloads on one cloud and some on another. In its 2016 "State of the Cloud Report," which surveyed more than 1,000 organizations, RightScale found that the percentage of enterprises planning to use multiple public clouds actually increased from 13 percent to 16 percent. Meanwhile, the number of respondents planning to use just one public cloud vendor fell from 10 percent to 9 percent.

The subtext here is that putting all of your eggs into one basket is too big a risk. That’s especially convincing when you consider that smaller, more nimble providers may have faster product development cycles and introduce offerings that are more appealing than their larger competitors. As one IT wag noted, that’s why you should just date your cloud provider and not marry them.

But putting theory into practice is never as easy as snapping your fingers. While mixing and matching PaaS and SaaS offerings from different vendors sounds like a great idea – who doesn’t want flexibility? – there are also myriad costs and service issues to consider.

For instance, if an organization has already adapted its business processes to work on one vendor’s platform, IT will need to come up with a very convincing argument to justify a move.  If IT can’t seamlessly move workloads between providers, that’s going to be a tough sell to the higher ups.

It can be difficult, sometimes bordering on the near impossible, to move between cloud service providers given the APIs, services and especially, data. Organizations also may wind up paying extra to use commercial software that needs to get integrated with its existing infrastructure. Keep in mind that one provider’s method of storing and exporting business-critical data may be quite different from another’s and migrating all that information could get messy and costly.

CIOs can also sleep easily knowing that a technology partner is going to be around for the long haul. That’s an often telling advantage enjoyed by the bigger, cloud players, especially Amazon, which dominates the public cloud and IaaS markets.

I’m just skirting the surface here, as there are arguments on both sides of a multi-sided debate. What you’ll find is that there are no easy answers and no small number of tradeoffs to be weighed. In the end, the decision whether or not to stick with a single big supplier has to balance out the short-term expenses against the expected longer-term benefits.

It’s a strategic decision that needs careful consideration. Caution ought to be the byword and here’s where an experienced managed service provider can help guide clients through the thickets to decide whether or not it makes sense to stick with a single vendor.

The answer could have make-or-break consequences for your cloud deployment. So take enough time to get it right the first time. 

This content is underwritten by VMware — and is editorially independent. It is produced in accordance with conventional standards of business journalism.

Charles Cooper is an award-winning freelance author who writes about business and technology. During his 30-plus year career, he has worked as an executive editor at several leading tech publications including CNET, ZDNet, PC Week and Computer Shopper.