It’s Time to Develop a Cloud Exit Strategy
Multi-cloud is emerging as a strategy for many organizations looking to innovate and build a competitive edge. However, just because “everyone is doing it” doesn’t mean they’re doing it right. Many enterprises are failing to prepare a cloud exit strategy as part of their cloud-migration planning. This risks disastrous results for their businesses, including prolonged downtime, decreased productivity — even data loss — should they need to change their cloud strategy or provider.
In this abridged version of a series of previously published articles, I will explore the concept of a cloud exit plan, including the challenges and strategic decisions you must make when first deploying an application to the public cloud and how one might make use of an exit plan, if one is ever required.
What if your organization had to either reduce its cloud footprint or exit a public cloud provider altogether? Would you have a smooth transition to a new provider or datacenter? Or would your organization have to contend with all of the same (and/or additional) challenges they faced when you first ventured to the cloud?
For reasons of corporate governance or compliance, many organizations are now realizing they need a cloud exit strategy, even for applications that run in global providers, such as Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud. Even if your organization never actually moves cloud workloads back on premises (a process known as cloud repatriation) an exit strategy can guide negotiations with providers and influence application design. Many organizations fear having to live with an inability to negotiate the best prices from a cloud provider, who is well aware that your applications have a significant dependency on their services.
The concept of “cloud exit” is simple. Some refer to it as a “reverse migration,” but simply put, a cloud exit strategy is exactly what it sounds like: a corporate plan developed to ensure that the cloud services that support business activities can be replaced or replicated efficiently, without significant disruption.
There are several reasons why an organization might consider a cloud exit strategy. First, having such a plan already in place can help a business maintain a higher level of business continuity and reliability by protecting against recurring outages. While most public cloud providers deliver exceptional uptime on reliable services, even the big players in the market have experienced significant outages in recent years. If this continues to be the case moving forward, an organization would either have to consider changing vendors, building a disaster-recovery solution between public clouds, or leveraging multiple diverse cloud endpoints to achieve higher levels of availability.
The second reason organizations might consider developing a cloud exit strategy is driven by the need to access innovation that can help the business better respond to changing market opportunities. Multi-cloud is all about exploiting the unique capabilities of different clouds, rather than going all-in with a single cloud vendor. For example, an organization might want to leverage new cutting-edge technology being offered by a cloud provider they are not currently using. Alternatively, a cloud provider might sunset, or no longer support, a particular application or service, leaving the application team looking for a replacement solution.
Legal requirements and regulations can also be a key driver for a cloud exit strategy. For example, data residency requirements across Europe are increasing. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets out rules on how personal identification information must be handled for EU residents. If your current provider is hosting this type of data in locations prohibited by GDPR, your organization will need a plan to move that data to another provider, because you are considered the owner of the data.
