What is Vendor Lock-In
Vendor Lock-In. Sounds scary, right? Vendor Lock-In is a term for the concern expressed by many enterprises moving their data to cloud networks that they are being “locked-in” to the cloud platform hosting. Cloud computing is an incredibly competitive industry, and giants like AWS and Azure don’t really want to share their customers with their peers. For this reason, cloud environments aren’t always designed to play well with others. In order to push proprietary applications, third-party offerings are often rendered incompatible, while cross-pollination between cloud providers is discouraged by making cloud-migration arduous and expensive. While it’s easy to move your data into these environments, it’s not always easy to move it somewhere else. That’s the dreaded vendor lock-in. And that’s where multicloud comes in.
Multi-cloud and Hybrid Cloud
Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud solutions provide enterprises a way out of vendor lock-in, ensuring no single provider is responsible for hosting all of your data. Multi-cloud is the use of two or more public cloud platforms, while hybrid cloud is the use of a public cloud platform in conjunction with other infrastructure, such as on premises networks, private cloud, and edge environments. There’s a lot of overlap between the two terms, and both seek to accomplish the same goal: diversifying your platforms to give your business all the benefits of modern cloud environments while maintaining your data autonomy.
As with all deployments, there are significant advantages and disadvantages to a multi-cloud layout. Aside from the increased freedom from avoiding vendor lock-in, multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud provide additional resilience by adding an increase in redundancy. Hosting all of your data on a single platform means you are only as stable and secure as that provider. If that platform were to become compromised, you’d lose everything. A multi-cloud solution offers greater flexibility and stability. If there’s a day where one provider is running slow, you can shift over to another option, mitigating your dependence on any one entity.
Unfortunately multi-cloud and hybrid cloud aren’t the easiest to implement. Managing multiple cloud or edge environments can be quite complex, and if the management tools you use aren’t built with multi-cloud in mind, the cross platform complexity can create high latency situations that could make you rethink all of those benefits that multi-cloud provides. Luckily, there are applications out there with the power to handle the complexities of multi-cloud.
The Azion Solution
Here at Azion, we believe cross-platform collaboration is essential to driving innovation. That’s why our distributed edge network is compatible not only with our own custom tools, but a whole host of third party offerings through Azion Marketplace. It’s also why we’re such big fans of multi-cloud’s potential. Our Load Balancer is a smart, layer 7 load balancing technology fully equipped to handle the high demands of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments, ensuring that your systems run smoothly even when passing data back and forth between multiple distinct providers.
Summary
Vendor Lock-In sounds scary, but it doesn’t have to be. Thanks to multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, your enterprise can still gain all the benefits of the global cloud and the network edge, without having to put all of your eggs in one basket. Just remember to use a load balancing tool such as Load Balancer, that is specifically designed to handle these unique environments, and you’ll be able to unlock the full power and freedom of multi-cloud.
