The year is 2023, and it is incredible to think that we are still discussing how to avoid vendor lock-in. As companies become increasingly reliant on accessing their data and gaining insights from it, the ability to be agile and flexible when it comes to the operating environment is crucial.
By Tunde Abagun, channel sales manager at Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa
This is where adopting multi-cloud environments provides an edge, giving companies a level of fluidity between platforms they might not have experienced before.
The cloud provides businesses with the means to simplify their data management while also improving their compliance stance. In South Africa, multinational hypervisors are rapidly installing in-country data centres to ensure organisations can comply with regulatory requirements, for instance, POPIA, while also giving them the freedom to innovate.
A reason to move
Local and global decision-makers no longer want to fear the technical incompatibilities and loss of control over their IT spending that results from relying on one service provider. Being vulnerable to one service provider’s pricing and development roadmap can constrain business growth.
Of course, the concept of vendor lock-in is more complex than having the freedom to move between cloud environments. It is a multi-dimensional challenge where organisations must seriously consider their multi-cloud migration journeys from technology, cost, and expert perspectives.
DBaaS cometh
Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) provides a compelling reason to embrace multi-cloud. This software-defined platform offers business and technology leaders a unified control plane for database management.
Some benefits of going the DBaaS route include saving money by buying capacity and functionality on an “as-needed” basis. The business does not need to invest in hardware purchases and maintenance. DBaaS eliminates capital costs and frees staff to focus on the logical administration of database and application data.
Traditional rollouts require requesting and allocating storage space, provisioning the database, and installing software, a process that can involve multiple teams. However, cloud-based database provisioning enables IT to deliver database instances to business units without manual intervention or lengthy approval times.
IT can adapt to the business’s data processing and storage requirements faster so that it is not a barrier to growth or innovation. Some platforms offer self-service capabilities to enable business units to power up or shut down resources without help from IT.
Beyond these benefits, DBaaS enables underutilised assets and system resources to be repurposed and used more efficiently. Systems can be turned on or off, depending on the current business needs, or shared with other departments to maximise the return on infrastructure investments.
Keeping things integrated
Throughout all this, companies still need to overcome the question of how deeply to integrate with a given cloud provider’s proprietary platform and services. Greater integration offers more significant rewards by enabling the business to take maximum advantage of the cloud-native service at hand. At the same time, the deeper the integration level, the more complex and expensive the service becomes, and the more dependent the company’s business remains on that cloud service.
The trick is to approach it from an application development initiative perspective. This shifts the focus from native, proprietary cloud platforms to open, abstracted container environments. Suddenly, the multi-cloud enables the delivery of commoditised utility services.
Going beyond lock-in
None of this means that some cloud service providers will not try to implement a vendor lock-in situation. To avoid this, companies must read the fine print. The simplest way to avoid vendor lock-in is to choose vendors wisely at the outset. Proactively take note of the vendor’s policies and note all the tools, features, APIs, and management interfaces that they provide.
Further, additional complexities and regulations might be involved when moving data from one provider to another. Data formatted for storage in a specific provider’s solution might not be compatible with the new vendor’s ecosystem and might need to be modified or transferred per regulations.
Crucially, a business must negotiate entry and exit strategies. Companies can take advantage of vendors’ propensity to offer free deployment and extra support or warranty for an extended duration. Switching clouds and even on-premises infrastructure is becoming more accessible with a lift and shift strategy.
Many companies keep moving between private and public clouds and on-premises infrastructures. Eventually, they realise that proprietary technologies offer better performance, tighter security, cost savings, or simpler operations than a vendor-independent solution. So, for example, a company cannot use AWS one day and then switch to Google the next.
However, with some straightforward due diligence, it is possible to reach a comfort level in operational flexibility and risk mitigation by ensuring a fallback vendor is available in case of a vendor fallout.