The cloud is almost synonymous with flexibility, though not all flexibility is the same. Before you know it, you’re locked into one solution or provider, and switching proves harder than expected. Is that really such a problem?
“The cloud was marketed as a solution for flexibility”, says Tobias Pauwels, Sales Director at Ctac. “However, cloud itself has evolved from infrastructure and hosting in the past to much broader and integrated solutions today. One possible consequence of this is that customers actually have less flexibility than before when they fully embrace this concept.”
Pauwels shares his insights at a cloud roundtable organized by ITdaily. His analysis is confirmed by Mario Casier, Business Unit Manager Cloud, Software Security at Copaco, Koen Claesen, Cloud Security Compliance Advisor for SAP, Dirk Deridder, CTO of Smals, and Luc Costers, Country Lead Nutanix Benelux and Eastern Europe at Nutanix.
Simplicity, Integration and Lock-In
“The more you use of one provider’s portfolio, the better all solutions are aligned with each other”, notes Deridder. “You can simply consume infrastructure as a service, but in the higher layers, you get greater value from the cloud. Often, the license cost is also lower when you choose integrated solutions from one provider.”
The more you benefit from that added value, the more deeply you become locked into a provider.
Dirk Deridder, CTO Smals
“The more you benefit from that added value, the more deeply you become locked into a provider,” he adds. This clearly brings risks with it. Pauwels: “When the price goes up, customers can’t say much about it.”
None of the attendees considers lock-in with a major provider or hyperscaler inherently bad. The consensus is that you definitely get something in return, but it comes with a higher risk.
Predictability
This risk isn’t merely theoretical. The conversation quickly turns to Broadcom, which since acquiring VMware has been unilaterally changing contracts, licenses, and terms. Customers and managed service providers working with VMware’s powerful portfolio suddenly face higher prices without being able to easily switch to an alternative.
Casier puts it diplomatically: “The developments at Broadcom have led to some uncertainty among partners about the future. Some are questioning whether they want to remain dependent on VMware.” Deridder, for example, runs about sixteen thousand virtual machines on VMware at Smals and is actively looking for an alternative.
An Exit Path
Deridder advocates for a good exit strategy, to the extent possible. “You can ensure that eighty percent of your application landscape is portable and movable to another environment. Then you only need to rewrite twenty percent if it ever becomes necessary, which is certainly better than the reverse.”
In Broadcom’s specific case, the gentlemen agree that the timeline was too short. Casier: “You can’t migrate an entire IT environment in three months.” “We see customers who continue paying this year primarily to buy time to make the switch”, Costers confirms.
“VMware’s product and technology are still very good”, Deridder adds. “But the company is unreliable”, he believes. “And that’s where the problem lies. Our IT strategy is built on quicksand this way. Even without the financial aspect, it’s therefore not a good idea to continue.”
A hybrid model becomes inevitable.
Tobias Pauwels, Sales Director Ctac.
“Customers won’t continue to accept price increases indefinitely”, predicts Pauwels. “A hybrid model becomes inevitable. A cloud environment needs to be as flexible as possible. Regarding the potential unreliability of major players, we’re only at the beginning.”
Trust
Trust proves to be the key. Lock-in with a technological solution from one party doesn’t have to be a disaster, as long as there’s trust.
Costers and Nutanix see the opportunity to position themselves as a reliable alternative in the Broadcom saga. “While customers may suspect a form of lock-in with Nutanix as well”, he acknowledges. “But we offer options. You have a choice of various hypervisors and underlying hardware, on- and off-premises use of licenses, and our migration tool Move works in both directions. You can easily migrate to, but also from Nutanix with it.”
One Type of Flexibility or Another
The fact is that absolute flexibility doesn’t currently exist. Either you choose flexibility in the form of scalability, managed services, standardization, and simplicity. In that case, you’ll need to tie yourself to one or more providers. Or you can prefer flexibility in the form of workload portability and platform independence. In that case, your environment becomes more complex, and you’ll need to do more yourself. You trade one type of flexibility for another.
“There isn’t one right choice”, emphasizes Deridder. “For Smals and the government, independence is a high priority, but that doesn’t have to be the same for other organizations.”
Don’t Fear Standardization
“The advantage of the cloud lies largely in standardization”, believes Claesen. “That’s why you should first ask yourself where you need flexibility, and in what way.”
The advantage of the cloud lies largely in standardization.
Koen Claesen, Cloud Security & Compliance Advisor SAP
Claesen criticizes that there’s often confusion about what exactly the cloud is, what you can do yourself, and what the added value is. This applies not only to customers but also to regulators. “Sometimes they demand that everything must be done in-house. But how does that work in practice? It quickly becomes clear that such a thing isn’t possible.”
“Or we still hear that certain customers or public institutions aren’t allowed to go to the cloud”, he continues. “From our perspective, it’s clear: we’re moving to the cloud. This can be done in different ways, public and private and even hybrid. But the strategic direction is definitely the cloud.”
This is the same with SAP as with other SaaS solutions, which all essentially run in the cloud. Companies sometimes think they want to avoid the cloud, yet they use Microsoft 365.
Advice and a Tailored Plan
Pauwels: “As a business, you need to seek advice. How are you going to approach things, where are you going to run them, and why.” “The cloud is a means and never an end in itself”, Casier adds. In this context, every organization must do its own assessment. Some form of vendor dependency seems inevitable in practice.
“Surround yourself with partners and experts, including external ones”, Casier summarizes. Which providers you partner with, and how much lock-in you’re willing to accept in exchange for integration and simplicity, is a trade-off everyone must make for themselves.
This is the second article in a series of three following our round table discussion on cloud computing. Click here to visit the theme page with the other articles, the video and our partners.