Long-term business relationships are frequently beneficial for everyone involved, but every now and then a long-term arrangement simply becomes too costly to maintain. For businesses looking to cut down on their daily costs of operating, suffering from cloud vendor lock-in can be a real nightmare, but it’s an easily avoidable one if you know what to be on the lookout for.
Avoiding cloud vendor lock-in begins with analyzing your options, signing intelligent contracts, and always being willing to cut your losses and run if you feel backed into a corner. Here’s how to avoid getting locked-in with a shoddy vendor who provides lackluster results time and time again.
Learn how to negotiate an exit strategy
The first and most important thing to remember when you begin negotiating with potential vendors is that you’re not just looking for an entry strategy, but also an exit strategy. If you sign a contract in a rush so that you can start employing cloud services as soon as possible, you may later discover that you’ve backed yourself into a corner and can’t quit your existing agreement without paying a tremendous sum of money. It’s imperative to establish upfront with your negotiating partners the fact that you’re looking to retain the right to exit from your arrangement whenever it stops being beneficial to your company. This will simultaneously ensure that the people who commit to negotiations with you are strictly those vendors with the confidence that they can deliver you excellent service regardless of how long it’s been since you signed the contract.
As you may already understand, it’s thus crucially important to take caution when picking out who you’re going to negotiate with. In this day and age, there’s a cloud vendor around every corner, so you can waste valuable time and money by interviewing and negotiating with slipshod vendors who aren’t particularly impressive. Nevertheless, it can be difficult to determine which vendors are the pros and which are the amateurs if you’re not an IT guru yourself. That’s why it’s worth reviewing some helpful tips on picking the right cloud service provider, as only through careful vetting can you ensure you don’t end up contractually obligated to a lackluster partner who can’t deliver what’s needed.
Of course, you can’t rely on a handful of tips alone. You should also be regularly brushing up on factual reviews on cloud storage so that you know what to expect when walking into your next negotiation. After all, not knowing the jargon is a surefire way to prove to prospective vendors that you’re an unserious client not worthy of their time and consideration.
Vendors who are completely unwilling to discuss exit strategies simply aren’t worth your time. Those vendors selling e cigarettes in the UK and are so confident in the services they provide that they’ll offer you exit guarantees, on the other hand, are worthy of your consideration. After all, they’re putting their money where their mouth is, illustrating that you can trust them to pony up the goods when the time arises.
Keep data hygiene in mind
Another crucial tip to keep in mind is that without data hygiene, migrating to a different cloud service provider will be a real nightmare. If your data isn’t clean and easily accessible, a new vendor will never be able to make sense of it, thus ensuring you’re stuck with whatever lackluster provider you’re currently shacked up with. If your data isn’t of the upmost quality, you can rest assured that certain cloud vendors won’t even want to do business with you, anyway. You should set some time aside to familiarize yourself with data hygiene practices that guarantee your company will have a treasure trove of high-quality data to give to its new service provider when you decide to make the switch.
You should also exercise caution when deciding what hardware to invest in; if you pick up the wrong hardware, you may find that certain cloud vendors are unwilling or literally incapable of working with your business because of previous acquisitions you’ve made. Enlisting the help of an IT expert when purchasing your IT goods will thus enable you to avoid being locked-in when it comes to securing excellent IT services.
Finally, you need to consider the human element of cloud vendor lock-in; if your human capital is unfamiliar with the new cloud system you’re considering adopting, you won’t be able to make the pivot and migrate over to that new system. Your engineers will need ample time to prepare themselves for a major change, so be sure to run by any forthcoming cloud migrations to them before committing yourself. The alternative is announcing that you intend to find a new provider only to discover that nobody on your team is capable of managing the migration to a new and improved service provider. Keep these tips in mind, and soon your company can flexibly pivot from one provider to the next until you’ve found somebody you’re truly satisfied with.
