While enterprise technology has changed dramatically over the last few decades, one thing has remained a constant: the fear of vendor lock-in. But in 2020, while lock-in remains a very real issue, there may be less need to worry about it than in the past.
For many businesses that are already leveraging public clouds and SaaS, the dream is to achieve flexibility in tech infrastructure and operations while still minimizing the inherent risks that come from being overly dependent on one provider. And a proliferation of open-source tools and multicloud approaches that have bubbled up in recent years make that look increasingly possible.
Get daily insights from the Protocol team in your inbox
But the truth is that tech buyers have been burned before. In the past, companies' concerns about vendor lock-in were indeed warranted. After having invested heavily in a particular tech vendor's products or services, companies often found it prohibitively expensive or disruptive to switch to a competing vendor, leaving them stuck with a potentially substandard service.
In previous decades, it was Oracle, IBM and Cisco that were often considered the most flagrant offenders, effectively hooking clients in with burdensome, multiyear enterprise licensing agreements for proprietary hardware or software. If there was an increase in prices, or a lapse in the continuity or quality of service, their clients were essentially out of luck. It didn't help either when larger tech companies began buying out smaller competitors, leaving customers with even fewer options. Such predatory corporate tactics continue to be a problem today, often resulting in higher prices for services and products, or controversy when there are conflicting interests, such as when Microsoft bought out open-source code repository GitHub back in 2018.
Understandably, tech buyers began to view proprietary lock-in as something to be avoided if at all possible.
Fast forward to today, and despite big technological shifts, the anxiety around vendor lock-in hasn't really gone away. The dominance of big cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud has meant that lock-in averse enterprise tech buyers are still casting around for alternatives, such as opting forhybrid public-and-private cloud or using multiple cloud providers.
One recent Bain & Company survey found that two-thirds of CIOs say they would prefer to use cloud services from several different vendors to avoid lock-in. Yet 71% of those companies still rely on only one cloud provider. The remaining 29% that do manage to pull off a multivendor strategy still spend an average of 95% of their cloud budget with one provider, effectively creating de facto lock-in. Potentially part of that problem: Engineering talent tends to specialize on one cloud or another, creating extra barriers to working with multiple providers.
Nevertheless, there's been a noticeable trend toward a multicloud approach, even among cloud providers. Despite its previous reluctance to offer such concessions as the frontrunner in cloud computing, AWS' recent multicloud-friendly upgrades to its cloud management tools signal a shift in its stance. Microsoft's introduction of Azure Arc as well as Google's recently announced Anthos also indicate the tech giants' grudging acknowledgement of the transition toward multicloud deployments and the tools needed to manage them.
"Public cloud providers are becoming more accepting of the fact that most of their customers are going to move to multicloud, or leveraging more than one public cloud," explained David Linthicum, chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting. "This means that cross-cloud tools and technology will arise, allowing public cloud customers to mix and match cloud services to leverage best-of-breed cloud services.
