Moving To The Cloud? Avoid Vendor Lock-In

There are several benefits to moving at least part of your day-to-day operations to the cloud. You can save money, become more flexible as a company and act faster. This is especially convenient for college students and young adults since their lifestyle is often followed by time management issues. However, if you are considering a switch to the cloud (either entirely cloud-based or a hybrid model) you are going to want to avoid vendor lock-in. If the very foundation of your companies IT is no longer in your hands, it is no more than normal that you have a few questions about the company. Here are some of the concerns you might have:

• What happens if my cloud service provider (CSP) goes out of business?
• What happens if my CSP changes in such a way that it no longer benefits my company?
• What happens if my CSP does not provide services that are adequate for my needs?

Those are all valid reasons why you would not want to be locked into one specific CSP. You want to be able to keep your infrastructure in place, want to remain the owner of your own applications, and you want to avoid any potential data transfer risk. What are some steps you can take?

Tip #1 – Make sure you do your research

You want to make sure that your CSP can handle your cloud needs and your applications. This means that you must:

• Determine your own goals for a cloud migration;
• Look at your current IT situation, make sure that you understand the cost of resources levels and infrastructure;
• Decide what cloud environment suits your needs: either hybrid, private or public;
• Look at the specific cloud components that you want or need;
• Determine what CSP is right for your situation.

Tip #2 – Look for the exit early

You do not want to get into a business relationship with the notion of getting out; just as you would not want to get married right away with plans for a divorce. However, you need to make sure that you have the steps in place for an exit strategy just in case things do not work out the way you had hoped. The most convenient way would be to come up with a written plan, including every little nuance, such as the potential costs or the consequences of your exit. All of these preparations will most likely cause challenges in university, such as not being able to balance out your workload. For such cases, there is a possibility of contacting quality essay writing service https://essaypro.com/. Similar sources can help you write academic papers, while you are busy thinking about your exit strategy.

Tip #3 – Consider a multi-cloud strategy

You should consider a multi-cloud environment. This means that you power your applications with multiple CSPs. For example, you can use one CSP as your data warehouse storage provider while opting for another for your computing power. By using a multi-cloud strategy, you become less dependent on a single CSP for everything that you do. While a multi-cloud strategy comes with its own challenges, it might be useful if you want to avoid vendor lock-in.

Tip #4 – Maximize your data portability

When talking about a cloud migration project, data tends to be one of the largest sticking points. Different models and different formats can lead to data portability issues. You want to avoid proprietary formatting to maximize the portability of your data. In addition to maximizing your data portability, you should make sure that your CSP has a way to extract your data easily and economically if you need. The most difficult risk to mitigate with a cloud migration project often tends to be data lock-in. That is why having this in place is going to make it easier to shift to another CSP if you need to do so.

The conclusion

By using a single cloud service provider, you are opening yourself up to several different issues. Make sure that you do your due diligence to avoid problems with vendor lock-in. That is going to offer you the tremendous benefits of the cloud without leaving yourself exposed to vendor lock-in down the road.