Flexibility drives cloud lock-in risk

Vendor lock-in is regularly levied as a criticism of cloud services. But the reality of IT is, there has always been lock-in. Even before cloud, enterprises were locked into hardware, operating systems, database platforms, data centers and network providers. Practically, the lock-in challenge with cloud isn’t that moving from one location or platform is not possible — it’s that the cost of moving can negate the benefit of doing so.

Cloud’s highly flexible model is a driver of lock-in. At the core of the cloud model, there are still data centers, servers and operating systems. Cloud has been revolutionary because of its pricing model, not necessarily because of the core technology. Rather than the buyer being concerned with capacity planning, for example, on-demand consumption allows users to consume the infrastructure they need with no capex, no advanced notification and no prepayment – buyers pay only for what they use, in arrears. The cloud provider is responsible for capacity planning and absorbs the risk of under- or overprovisioning.