The pros and cons of aspiring to be cloud provider agnostic

One of the challenges with shifting your business data and resources to a new environment – whether it be on-prem, public cloud or private cloud – is that, once you make the shift, it can be prohibitively difficult to change your mind and shift again. As such, it’s important to do your due diligence before making the leap, which should include an exit strategy in case circumstances change and you’re forced to shift again.

As with all major decisions regarding business risk, it is important that the decision is driven by the business and aligned with the needs of the business, rather than just handled by the IT team. Embracing the cloud can be a significant catalyst for business transformation, presenting organisations with an opportunity to look in the mirror and rethink not just their technology landscape, but the very fundamentals of how they do business.

Some organisations aim to be cloud provider ‘agnostic’, avoiding vendor lock-in by ensuring it is relatively easier to lift and shift their cloud investments from one service provider to another. The quest to be cloud provider agnostic should not come at too high a price in terms of stifling business transformation.

There are certainly valid reasons why organisations should consider the impact of potential cloud vendor lock-in. Regulatory changes in some sectors – such as data jurisdiction, privacy and compliance requirements – can force organisations to rethink their cloud strategy. That said, this is becoming less of an issue as compliance frameworks become more cloud friendly, and regulators would likely work with industry to manage the introduction of changes that impacted their ability to utilise the cloud.

The more significant risk is that once your organisation embraces the cloud it can leave you vulnerable to price rises, as public cloud providers know that it is difficult for you to take your business elsewhere. Unlike with your other service providers, you’re unlikely to go back to the market on a regular basis in search of a slightly better deal.

Strong competition between the three public cloud giants – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform – saw the price of operating in the cloud steadily fall for many years. Now pricing structures have levelled out and we’re even starting to see price increases in some areas, which can leave organisations feeling vulnerable.

On top of this is the cost of data ingress and egress, as most public cloud providers charge a fee every time you move data out of the cloud, while some also charge when you move data in. Those costs can add up if you’re looking to make a wholesale exit from a cloud service provider. It is critical to fully understand cloud economics when planning a cloud migration and weighing up cloud agnostic options.

Weighing the costs

Price sensitivity is particularly high in some sectors such as education and not-for-profit, where public cloud providers often offer significant discounts. Should the terms and conditions of those programs change, leaving an organisation no longer eligible, it may not be able to cope with the burden of full commercial pricing.

Apart from the financial cost of getting your data out of one cloud provider and into another, there can also be significant integration, workflow and business process challenges, along with retraining and change management challenges. Then there are in-house skill sets required to manage the new cloud environment.

Changing cloud services providers is something that organisations would rather avoid but, if they do need to make the leap, a cloud agnostic approach that favours interoperability can help minimise cost and disruption. In theory, a cloud agnostic approach makes it easier to lift and shift your cloud investments from one service provider to another. The rise of virtualisation, containerisation and managed database services makes it easier to migrate servers and workloads between public cloud service providers.

In practice, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for organisations to be completely cloud agnostic, so it is a question of deciding where your priorities lie.

While a cloud agnostic approach helps mitigate the risk of vendor lock-in, the downside is that it limits an organisation’s ability to fully utilise the strengths and capabilities of any one cloud provider. Designing your cloud infrastructure to meet the lowest common denominator can have an impact in terms of performance, agility, scalability, efficiency and costs. Your organisation may pay the price in terms of missed opportunity and revenue, delayed time to market, hindered projects and stifled innovation – perhaps negating the potential savings should a migration be deemed necessary.

For some organisations, a robust multi-cloud strategy – making the best of each platform on a per workload basis – is more practical and delivers better outcomes than adopting a cloud agnostic strategy. It allows the business to place different workloads with the provider best-suited to the task, fill in the gaps should certain providers lack specific services and optimise costs across different services. All while ensuring the organisation is not completely reliant on one cloud service provider. This also allows for the possibility to migrate some services across to a different cloud provider without necessarily needing to go through the pain of migrating between cloud-based productivity suites and collaboration platforms.

A hybrid cloud strategy – keeping some resources on-prem while shifting others to the cloud – can also help an organisation remain more cloud agnostic. This shouldn’t come at the cost of hanging on to legacy on-prem systems that may be holding the organisation back, rather than retiring technical debt and looking to the future.

Of course the trade-off with multi and hybrid cloud strategies is complexity compared to sticking with the one cloud provider for all your needs. Once again, it is important to crunch the numbers and weigh up all the options, to ensure that your efforts to avoid vendor lock-in don’t hinder your organisation more than they help.