Crack the cloud vendor lock-in dilemma

Vendor lock-in means that when you wish to move your business away from one of your current vendors you are prevented to do so because of the projected cost, duration, or complexity of switching to a new vendor. In a cloud context, you often have the opportunity of selecting one single service provider to support an end-to-end solution that immediately gives you all of the features you need. Although a single vendor cloud strategy would make perfect sense short-term – in regards to what functionality you will have access to, cost implications and not least time to implement – it would also come with a number of risks:

• Your ability to keep up with business opportunities from new technology is limited to what new features your selected cloud provider supports
• Your future IT cost depends on what prices and what price increases your provider charges
• Your data security, availability and quality of service rely completely upon the delivery of one single external company

To avoid the risks of being caught in a vendor lock-in situation there is a number of strategies to follow. One crucial area is to avoid applications that are specifically tailored to fit the infrastructure of one single cloud provider. Another central component is to architect your cloud solution to support multi- and hybrid-cloud designs. For a cost-efficient long-term IT design based on cloud services, secure the ability to:

• Scale compute and storage resources up and down independently of each other
• Combine cloud-based and on-prem resources
• Combine products and services from different vendors

ZebClient supports you

ZebClient accelerates your data access performance through the implementation of a smart acceleration layer. The acceleration layer also serves as a disaggregation layer, separating the concerns of compute and storage resources. The disaggregation of compute and storage supplied by ZebClient means that you are able to mix and match compute and storage products and services from different vendors.

With ZebClient you can prevent vendor lock-in effects by:

• Cost-efficiently dispersing and storing data in multiple cold object storages – in the cloud and on-prem
• Building your compute solution based on what compute products and services that currently fit you application needs best
• Updating, scaling up and down and replacing storage and compute solutions as you go along

ZebClient also provides an easy tool, ZebClient Manager, to perform updates to size and suppliers of your infrastructure.

Your data is one of the most important – or even the most important asset – your company have. To put your most important asset at the mercy of one single other company brings business risk along. Learn more about how ZebClient can support your multi-vendor strategy.

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