The cloud computing world is becoming increasingly dominated by a small number of IT giants aiming to be your one-stop services shop. From infrastructure to software, one vendor could hypothetically provide an organisation’s entire IT system. Naturally, this is appealing to users that want to simplify their estate and partner with a well-established and reliable cloud host – but ask yourself, do you really want all your eggs in one basket?

With risks like hacking and large-scale denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) on the rise, many organisations are now looking to keep their options open and spread their IT requirements across different service providers to improve redundancy and balance risk. However, some organisations already find themselves backed into a corner and locked into their primary, dominant vendor.

So, what causes vendor lock-in and how are the IT giants really driving this problem? What’s more, how can organisations avoid becoming locked on to one cloud-computing provider?

The lock-in challenge

Many of the larger scale and legacy IT companies within the market have allowed their customers to become increasingly dependent on the single provider model by making their technologies incompatible with other systems – meaning these vendors can make it very hard for organisations to switch later on down the line. A range of issues, such as inefficient processes and extremely high costs, mean migration between cloud vendors can be a time-consuming and expensive pain point. The alternative is to stick with a cloud provider that doesn’t meet your business needs.

One of the biggest mistakes that can leave an organisation locked-in with a single vendor is a lack of planning in the initial stages of a deployment or migration. Before an organisation even looks to contact a cloud vendor, the IT team should do their homework and find out if the service providers they are considering are going to be able to meet their business needs. If they can, there shouldn’t be any reason for the organisation to leave later on down the line anyway.

Even once all the research is out of the way, though, it can never hurt to have an exit plan should you want to switch vendor in the future. Let’s draw a non-tech comparison; when entering into a marriage, some people choose to opt for a pre-nup to ensure the divide is clearly set out, and opting for a cloud provider should adopt an equivalent, objective approach. For this reason, organisations should have a detailed implementation plan in place when signing contracts with their chosen provider. This should include the option to easily and cost-effectively migrate data out and to a new provider if the need arises.

Keep your options open

Choosing the right vendor for your business should be based on a clear understanding of each individual cloud technology in the mix. An increasingly popular strategy is for organisations to opt for a multi-cloud approach that combines different types of cloud – private, public and hybrid – allowing them to reap the benefits of all of them without compromise. For this reason, organisations should be considering not just one cloud provider, but multiple ones to ensure the best provider for each need, such as backup, computing and disaster recovery.

This sort of approach should also be paired with keeping applications as flexible as possible – i.e. not vendor specific. For instance, you can keep cloud components linked with application components, rather than creating a lot of mess later on if you want to move providers. It’s also sensible to back up your data regularly in an easily useable format to eliminate any future mishaps. Similarly, having separate security and disaster recovery options could be important for business continuity – it could be the difference between disaster and recovery.

It’s also important to focus on the future and emerging tech trends, such as DevOps. Reconfiguring applications to run on a new platform is time consuming and expensive. But using open platforms, such as Docker containers, means organisations can isolate software and have them running on top of the infrastructure. They are also easy to relocate and rebuild, which saves a lot of hassle if and when you decide to move over to a new provider. Configuration management tools can also be utilised to automate the configuration of your infrastructure.

But if you do just one thing to avoid vendor lock-in, it should be to create that exit plan. The big market players are bound to come up with more products and services to entice businesses away from their competition, and vendor-lock-in has become an unfortunate side effect – good forward planning will need to go hand-in-hand with the future direction of the cloud industry.

The recent survey by 451 Research and Microsoft proves that investment in cloud hosting and managed services is soaring, with almost two thirds of overall cloud and hosting infrastructure spend comes aligned with value-added services. 

As the number of organisations moving towards the cloud increases, so too does the demand for the expertise, knowledge and tools that make the transition successful.

Therein lies a real challenge.

Lots of third parties can provide cloud hosting and services, but as the recent cyber breach of ABTA has shown, the downsides of a service interruption can be severe and lingering.

The choice of cloud partner is becoming more important than ever, particularly when that partner is delivering a ‘managed’ service, where they take greater responsibility for confidentiality, reliability and availability.

But who can offer the right kind of guidance, and what should organisations look for when choosing to invest in the value added services of a managed cloud provider?

Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride

One of the biggest takeaways from the study was the amount of investment directed towards lowering the risk of cyber attacks, and as data regulation gets tighter, including the implementation of GDPR, security becomes a bigger issue than ever.

Companies will be obligated to disclose the extent of breaches to both regulatory bodies as well as customers, and failure to comply will result in hefty financial penalties, loss of sensitive data and a hit to company reputation.

As compliance and security become even more essential to the success of cloud journeys, companies should look to invest in service providers that are equipped to render data unintelligible to those who wish to criminally obtain it.

Services such as data encryption can provide this assurance, as well as help protect against any backlash.

Always check your mirrors

A company’s online presence is a reflection of its brand identity, and it’s important that the platforms that sustain it are always available.

As the research shows, there is a lack of skills and knowledge in-house for companies to depend on when undergoing key digital developments, so businesses should look to third parties to provide guaranteed uptime.

For any organisation looking to undergo its journey with a goal of high reliability, choosing a provider who can offer a ‘no single point of failure’ design will minimise the chance of downtime.

Give your infrastructure a regular MOT

There have been plenty of high profile cases of websites taken offline by peaks in consumer visits or criminal activity.

A reputable managed cloud provider will offer continuous auditing on resources in order to identify issues before they manifest in order to avoid more of the same.

Non-intrusive scanning for real-time network threat awareness also allows IT staff to make better decisions about risk, faster.

Invest in recovery in case of a breakdown

Sometimes a system failure is unavoidable. For these instances, most managed cloud providers will offer disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) in order to minimise data loss and ensure business continuity should the worst happen.

Full, continuous replication to a third party, offsite facility provides near instant recovery in the case of an outage.

Ultimately, choose the right passenger to help you navigate

The research shows that, perhaps most surprisingly, ‘premium, 24/7 support services’ is the area of managed services expected to see the biggest increase in demand in the coming year, ahead of disaster recovery and backup.

This proves that while a company puts precedence on the accessibility of their own resources, so too do they place importance on the dependability of the service provider employed to manage and guide them.

In essence, the journey to cloud can be a challenging one, particularly as new regulation comes into place.

However, choosing a hosting provider with an ‘extra mile’ ethos to service, dedicated account managers that know each company account inside out as well as the safest route means that no query or concern is too big or small along the way. 

Opinion As digital transformation continues to dominate the IT landscape, cloud computing has helped a wealth of organisations to evolve. So true is the fact that Gartner predicts that by 2020, a corporate “no-cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-internet” policy is today. The CIO of 2017 undoubtedly needs to embrace the cloud, but the transition is still a sizeable task without adequate help and guidance.

Managed service providers have been around for a while and can provide any manner of services – virtual desktops, security, storage – you name it and there is a company out there who will provide it ‘as a service’. Enter managed cloud providers – the new breed of MSP – with expertise in everything cloud.

But what exactly should a CIO look for in a managed cloud provider? What responsibilities remain at the executive level or with the internal IT team? Should the CIO be looking for a ‘trusted advisor’ or an ‘outsourced partner CIO’?

The changing role of the CIO

These questions can only be answered by first looking at the role of the CIO and how this – alongside, but also independently of IT – is changing. The role of the traditional CIO was technical oversight of day-to-day IT operations. The CIO was a seasoned IT pro with the desire to step away from his desk overwhelmed with computer screens and walk into a position that controlled IT spending. 

But who does the CIO turn to for expertise and guidance? Finding trusted partners has always been a great option for IT teams looking to expand on the knowledge and capabilities they have in-house. With experts now owning the title of ‘managed cloud providers’ it is a game changer for a CIO looking for a cloud strategy.

Holding up their side of the bargain

When entering into an outsourced partnership there are expectations on both sides. If a managed cloud provider is entrusted with propelling a company into the era of cloud, harnessing a company’s dependency on data to find a competitive advantage and being a trusted partner to the CIO then they have to bring something a bit special to the table.

A truly great managed cloud provider looks at the situation from every level –  they are a trusted ‘outsourced CIO’ who can provide guidance about strategy and part of the IT team who can roll up its sleeves and get into the weeds of combining the existing IT infrastructure with the innovative benefits of the cloud. But this is always easier said than done.

Meeting C-level expectations 

A managed cloud provider’s job is to juggle balls, anticipate needs, provide guidance and be one step ahead of any issues that might arise – to be an extra set of eyes and ears for the CIO.

It may seem basic, but if a managed cloud provider cannot deliver constant availability and isn’t always on the lookout for things that could cause an outage, then the rest is all pointless. Availability is an managed cloud provider’s bread and butter providing the performance a CIO expects and depends on.

As important as availability is, sometimes it’s not enough. In a world always demanding faster and better, performance must be a priority. Always honing in on performance bottlenecks and how to resolve them should be an everyday thing for a managed cloud provider. This is especially true when AWS-like cloud instances can be set up instantaneously and over-used resources and auto-scaling can get out of control.

Compliance – although not a factor for every company or industry – should still be part of a managed cloud provider’s repertoire. Regulations, including the US-EU Privacy Shield and GDPR, mean storing data can be complex and that not all data at a company can be stored in the cloud. As a managed cloud provider, deep knowledge and understanding of any regulation that could impact a customer is vital. As a CIO, the responsibility to comply with all regulations can be daunting, but if a managed cloud provider can provide insight, guidance and most importantly compliance, it can make a huge difference.

Compliance goes hand in hand with security. As public cloud begins to play a larger part in IT strategy, CIO’s can often feel like the control of security is slipping away. A seasoned managed cloud provider has security experts on hand to continuously protect against the latest iteration of attacks and provide proactive security policies.

In the face of all these fundamentals, managed cloud providers have to bring opportunities, innovation and creativity to their work. As workloads expand and change how are those handled differently? What strategic choices can be made around the combination of public, private and hybrid cloud?

And if any of this goes wrong – which is hopefully something you don’t experience as a CIO, but let’s pretend – a great managed cloud provider will have noticed and be on the phone before the customer has realised anything is wrong. An action plan must be in place, issues must be escalated in an efficient manner and solutions, or at least personnel working on a solution, must be available to jump. This is the service portion of a managed cloud provider, but in the eyes of a CIO it can be the critical safety net to the cloud.

It is all about trust

As individual areas, these are all important, but the biggest thing a CIO should expect from their managed cloud provider is trust. There is always a risk in handing over the keys to the IT castle, but through a built-up track record and thoughtful guidance, a managed cloud provider should instil confidence in any CIO and be a trusted partner no matter the journey a company is taking through digital transformation and into the cloud.