Managing technical lock-in in the cloud

This guidance outlines how to make informed choices about your organisation’s reliance on cloud technologies.

When using the public cloud you should expect to only pay for what you use and avoid upfront costs. This can provide your organisation with significant savings and efficiencies over traditional data centre models.

But while there is more flexibility available in the cloud, there is a risk you can become dependent on the products and services from particular providers. This is called lock-in, where switching from one technology or provider to another is difficult, time consuming and disproportionately expensive.

Typically, lock-in is considered something organisations should avoid. However, in the cloud the advantages of being locked-in can often outweigh the disadvantages. For example, using a cloud provider to manage your storage lifecycle might lead to lock-in, but will reduce the work required to manage your service. Accepting some lock-in can allow delivery teams to:

You should balance these benefits of cloud lock-in against the potential risks, so you can get the best value and reduce the burden of future legacy technology.

There are generally 2 different types of lock-in. Many organisations have experience with commercial lock-in where long and inflexible contracts with providers can prevent organisations from changing their technology strategy when circumstances change.

With public cloud services, providers typically have rolling, pay-as-you-go contracts. In theory this means you can stop using their services at any time, but in practice this can be difficult. This is technical lock-in, and can be caused by: