Hyperscaler domination
The cloud computing market is becoming increasingly dominated by a small number of IT giants, known as hyperscalers. From infrastructure to software, these vendors are aiming to provide an organisation’s entire IT system. Naturally, this is appealing to users that want to simplify their estate and partner with a well-established and reliable cloud host – but, have you considered the potential risks of this approach?
With growing concerns over cloud concentration risk, and large-scale cyberattacks on the rise, many organisations are now looking to keep their options open and spread their IT requirements across different service providers to improve redundancy and balance risk. However, some organisations already find themselves backed into a corner and locked into their primary, dominant vendor.
So, what causes vendor lock-in and how are the IT giants really driving this problem? How can your organisation avoid becoming locked in to one provider?
The vendor lock-in challenge
Many of the larger scale and legacy IT companies have allowed their customers to become increasingly dependent on the single provider model. The hyperscalers make their technologies incompatible with other systems, meaning it can be very hard for organisations to switch provider later down the line, an issue known as vendor lock-in. A range of issues, such as inefficient processes and extremely high costs, mean migration between cloud vendors can be time-consuming and expensive. The alternative is to stick with a cloud provider that doesn’t meet your business needs.
One of the biggest mistakes that can leave an organisation locked-in with a single vendor is a lack of planning in the initial stages of a deployment or migration. Before an organisation even looks to contact a cloud vendor, the IT team should do their homework and find out if the service providers they are considering are going to be able to meet their business needs. If they can, there shouldn’t be any reason for the organisation to leave later on down the line.
Even once all the research is out of the way, though, it can never hurt to have an exit plan should you want to switch vendor in the future. Let’s draw a non-tech comparison; when entering into a marriage, some people choose to opt for a prenup to ensure the divide is clearly set out, and opting for a cloud provider should adopt an equivalent, objective approach. For this reason, organisations should have a detailed implementation plan in place when signing contracts with their chosen provider. This should include the option to easily and cost-effectively migrate data out and to a new provider if the need arises.
Keep your options open
Choosing the right vendor for your business should be based on a clear understanding of each individual cloud technology in the mix. An increasingly popular strategy is for organisations 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, organisations 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. For instance, you can keep cloud components linked with application components, rather than creating a lot of mess later on if you want to move providers.
It’s also sensible to back up your data regularly in an easily usable format to eliminate any future mishaps. Similarly, having separate security and disaster recovery options could be important for business continuity.
It’s also important to focus on emerging tech trends. Reconfiguring applications to run on a new platform is time consuming and expensive. But using open platforms, such as Docker containers, means organisations 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 utilised to automate the configuration of your infrastructure.
But if you do just one thing to avoid vendor lock-in, it should be to create that exit plan. The big market players are bound to come up with more products and services to entice businesses away from their competition, and vendor-lock-in has become an unfortunate side effect – good forward planning will need to go hand-in-hand with the future direction of the cloud industry.
How can Hyve support you to avoid vendor lock-in?
We provide ourselves on our vendor-agnostic approach, working with the top vendors 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. We put your needs first, and will not trap you into platforms and technologies that do not work for you.
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.
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.
