Vendor Lock-in Fears Hinder Cloud Migrations

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Vendor lock-in is a fear that spreads into the cloud, according to a new hybrid cloud survey from Stratoscale, a cloud infrastructure startup known for help organizations to spin up Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions within the confines of their own data centers.

Feeling trapped by one’s server, storage and software investments isn’t unique to on-premises IT environments. After polling 650 IT professionals, the company found that more than 80 percent of enterprises are experiencing high or moderate levels of concerns over public cloud lock-in. These worries are more acute among C-level and high-rankings IT executives, according to the study.

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Another big concern is security, and rightfully so. It is the primary reason enterprises are opting for private cloud solutions. Respondents generally agreed that it would take security improvements and some price slashing to get them to replace their private cloud deployments with public cloud services.

Stratoscale’s findings also indicate that those concerns are keeping businesses and their workloads from making the move to the public cloud.

Most organizations (65 percent) have migrated less than 20 percent of their workloads to public cloud data centers. Among large enterprises with over 10,000 employees, 70 percent said they transitioned less than 20 percent of their workloads to public clouds.

Among enterprises that have embraced the public cloud, most have done so tentatively, the study suggests. More than 80 percent of those organizations are avoiding placing regulated apps, sensitive data and high-priority workloads in the trust of public cloud providers.

Enterprises may be dragging their feet along the journey to the hybrid cloud, but the demands of their digital transformation efforts and other initiatives to modernize their business processes for the cloud, mobile and IoT era will start nudging them into the arms of public cloud vendors.

“The transformation to a ‘digital business’ by implementing cloud services and platforms is no longer much of an option – it’s an imperative for the continued survival of any enterprise. The findings from our survey confirm what we’re hearing from our customers—although many have started their journey to the public cloud, the vast majority of companies are still running mission critical workloads and sensitive data in private solutions, primarily for security reasons,” said Ariel Maislos, CEO at Stratoscale, in a statement.

“It’s clear the hybrid cloud model represents the near and long-term future for most enterprises, regardless of size,” added the Stratoscale executive.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.