Vendor lock-in is traditionally seen as a serious problem. I have a different view. What comes to mind when I think about lock-in is a quote from the movie, The Matrix: “Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth: There is no spoon.” The spoon isn’t real, and maybe cloud vendor lock-in isn’t real, either.
I recently read a blog by Adam Burden, Accenture’s chief software engineer, entitled, “Why vendor lock-in is now a price worth paying.” Adam compares the risks of cloud vendor lock-in with the benefits that come from being able to leverage a cloud provider’s proprietary features. He observes that there are signs that the instinctive avoidance of vendor lock-in is starting to soften. When faced with the trade-off, more and more enterprises are accepting cloud vendor lock-in.
It is false to say that lock-in negates the benefits of a provider’s proprietary services. In The Matrix, humans have become trapped in an alternate reality they suppose is real. Similarly, enterprises have adopted an alternate reality where the perception is that switching cloud vendors comes at a significant price. In the “really real” world, the cost of switching cloud vendors, and therefore mitigating lock-in, has never been more affordable.
Why are we afraid of lock-in?
It comes as no surprise that enterprises have an underlying fear of lock-in. History has shown that vendors can make it painful for customers to take their business elsewhere. The world is littered with examples of vendors acting aggressively to keep your business—enforcing high switching costs, leveraging restrictive licensing terms and invoking audits.
With the birth of cloud, enterprises had the chance to avoid upfront hardware investments and software licensing commitments, finally gaining some leverage against a generation of bad behavior by vendors when it came to lock-in. Unfortunately, enterprise scar tissue runs deep, and previous lock-in pains have remained front of mind.
Multi-cloud offered the idea that interoperability between clouds could offer a mechanism to avoid cloud lock-in. Lack of cloud standardization meant that the multi-cloud defense against lock-in never really materialized. However, the fear of lock-in is so prevalent that the idea of multi-cloud interoperability has given rise to a proliferation of cloud agnostic vendors selling the multi-cloud promise.
Actually, there’s no such thing
There is no such thing as lock-in unless you agree to it contractually. Lock-in has become the anticipated fear of the perceived difficulty required to switch vendors. Yes, there is always a cost to switch, but far less so with a large cloud provider’s proprietary services. Even a cloud-agnostic approach will not avoid switching costs, but instead will result in a lowest-common-denominator cloud strategy, with a larger price tag.
The reality is that the anticipated fear of vendor lock-in only occurs when an organization invokes a switch. The desire to switch providers could be caused by a variety of things. You may feel that you’re no longer getting good value for cost. The provider could be underperforming, leading you to lose market position. Or you might be looking for more innovation and continuous improvement than you’re getting. The top-three reasons for switching are:
What are the benefits of realizing that the spoon is not real?
The major cloud providers’ pace of innovation and their behavioral patterns should reassure you that they will continue to win business, maintain market relevance and perform admirably—some more than others. It was cloud that made it possible to negate the previous generation of bad behavior when it came to lock-in, and it will be cloud that continues that trend.
There is great power in knowing what’s real and what isn’t. When organizations understand that the perceived cost of switching cloud vendors is not real, they can unleash the potential of adopting cloud’s proprietary services, knowing with confidence they have made the right call. The spoon may not be real, but the benefits of innovation definitely are.
Author Campbell Abbey is global lead - AWS artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions, Accenture. Read more from Accenture here.
