A question that pops up very often lately from
enterprises considering cloud deployment
models is: Will moving to one public cloud
platform constitute a vendor lock-in risk?
Also, would a hybrid deployment model between public clouds and on premises, or with
another public cloud, reduce or mitigate this risk?
To answer these questions, this article weighs the risk of vendor lock-in vs. the value
added to businesses from adopting a vendor’s multiple cloud-based services. We will
take a look at these issues from different perspectives, including technology, human
resources and organizational level concerns. These, in turn, will take into account: new
emerging application architectures, database solutions, managed services, financial fac-
tors, security, compliance, employee skills, productivity, overall organizational perfor-
mance, time-to-market and cloud exit strategy, among other factors.
The goal is to help assess the value added from adopting vendor cloud services com-
pared to only thinking of cloud adoption the old way, from a vendor lock-in perspective.
The services evaluated here represent a sample, not an exhaustive list, to illustrate the
issues to consider.
Let us start by looking at compliance as added value to a business, versus the cloud ser-
vice provider (CSP) lock-in risk.
Compliance
Compliance could be one of the most influential factors for regulated industries moving
workloads to public clouds to meet business requirements. As a matter of fact, compli-
ance itself might motivate an enterprise to move to the cloud as it expands its opera-
tions and markets.
In reality, it can take a massive effort to get private data centers, or a private cloud, to
work with multiple compliance frameworks and regulatory requirements, and then to
stay in compliance. Examples of compliance standards include the PCI DSS, SOC 1, SOC
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