What’s Vendor Lock-In And How To Avoid It?
Vendor lock-in is defined as a scenario in which an organization is forced to continue using a certain product or service and is unable to switch vendors due to expected costs, complexity or the expected duration of migration. Businesses are ‘locked in’ to a specific unsuitable product or service due to expected financial constraints, difficulties or potential disruptions to crucial business processes. Recent studies have shown that approximately 67% of CIOs would prefer to use cloud services from several different vendors to avoid vendor lock-in. However, 71% of these companies still rely on the same cloud solution provider.
Businesses should avoid vendor lock-in as much as possible as it can cause a wide variety of issues in terms of operations and scalability. It can result in users being unable to transfer valuable organizational data without incurring significant costs. It can be especially problematic for cloud-based solutions, as it can be extremely difficult to migrate established cloud databases. Therefore, modern, data-driven organizations must avoid vendor lock-in as much as possible.