For more than a decade, IT managers and advocates have been working tirelessly to enable solutions based on common standards and protocols that can be built, supported, swapped out and replaced, regardless of vendor. And they almost succeeded -- until lately.
Cloud computing may be erasing the gains we've made in terms of vendor dependence lock-in. Going with a cloud solution means buying into the specific protocols, standards and tools of the cloud vendor, making future migration costly and difficult. How is this so? Because standards are still being formed, and cloud computing is still too immature to reach the point where customers are demanding vendor independence. The problem is, when companies sit down to calculate the cost of using cloud computing services, they don’t factor in the costs of migrating off the system – expenses which could be prohibitive and unexpected.
That's the caution being expressed by Thomas Erl, CEO of Arcitura Education Inc., a service technology education and certification provider, incorporating SOASchool.com and CloudSchool.com.
I recently caught up with Thomas, who is also a best-selling and perhaps most prolific IT author on the planet, who shared some of his concerns with the emerging cloud computing paradigm.
“With cloud environments, its kind of a new level of lock in,” he points out. “You can have your application. It can be standards-compliant for certain interoperability functions. But the actual hosting of the application, the actual requirements for that application to exist in a cloud environment, to connect to the virtualized resources and whatever administration tools the cloud providers may give you to configure and maintain the application, will be, for the most part, controlled by the cloud provider.”
This new degree of cloud vendor lock-in “is a step backwards from all the work that has been done with approaches such as service oriented architecture," Thomas adds. "SOA helped free us from the tech vendor lock-in model that we had a decade ago, in terms of motivating the transition towards interoperability level standards.”
By motivating, Thomas means getting vendors on board to enable the unfettered movement of data and services between any solution you happen to install. However, there really hasn't been any compelling reasons for vendors to do that now in the cloud world. “The whole industry is really not that standardized at all,” he points out. “The cloud environments themselves are really in no way regulated, or there’s no sense yet that there’s a need to comply with industry standards. Cloud providers benefit from keeping things proprietary as long as possible, because it locks consumers into their environment."
Thus, many companies now using cloud services from third-party vendors are in for a rude awakening when it's time to move on. And there may be many reasons why it's time to move away from your current cloud provider. "The cloud provider could be bought out by a larger company, and a bunch of policies change," Thomas illustrates. "Or the cloud provider may increase their leasing costs, or change the leasing terms, or geographically they shift around so that everything that you own is in Russia, and that conflicts with some legal requirements you may have."
How easy will it be to move when circumstances change? What if a good part of your application infrastructure resides with a single cloud provider? "When you put a lot of your resources, a lot of your data in the cloud, you want to know that, a year later, you want to be able to move that to another cloud provider," Thomas says. "You want to know that you can move all that away to another cloud provider, or even bring that back on premises, if that's the exit strategy."
Vendor lock-in may be unavoidable at this point, but what companies need to do is understand up-front what the exit strategy will be, and build those costs into the initial cost analysis. "Knowing that you can move it in the future, and knowing the impact of that helps complete that analysis," Thomas explains. "Then you understand not just the cost of the move, but you can also view it as an additional risk factor in the move to the cloud. It will help you to determine to what extent you want to move resources to the cloud. Once you take that into account, it might help moderate some of that."
Only one thing will eliminate or reduce the risk of vendor lock-in in the long run: if end-user customers start demanding standardization and interoperability, just as they have in the past with on-premises applications. "Once it dawns among organizations that use third-party clouds that they need to demand this from cloud providers, then the cloud providers will fall in line."
