For much of the history of enterprise technology, companies tended to buy from a single vendor because it made managing the entire affair much easier while giving them a “single throat to choke” when something went wrong. On the flip side, it also put customers at the mercy of said vendor — and it wasn’t always pretty.
As we move deeper into the cloud model, many IT pros are looking for more flexibility than they had in the past, avoiding the vendor lock-in from the previous generation of enterprise tech, and what being beholden to a single vendor could mean for the bottom line and their own flexibility.
This is something that comes up frequently in discussions about moving workloads from one cloud to another, and is sometimes referred to as a multi-cloud approach. Customers are loath to leave their workloads in the hands of one vendor again and repeat the mistakes of the past. They are looking to have the same flexibility on the infrastructure side that they are getting in the SaaS world, where companies tend to purchase best-of-breed from multiple vendors.
That means, they want the freedom to move workloads between clouds, but that’s not always as easy a prospect as it might seem, and it’s an area where startups could help lead the way.
What’s the problem?
What’s stopping customers from just moving data and applications between clouds? It turns out that there is a complex interlinking of public cloud APIs that help the applications and data work in tandem. If you want to pull out of one public cloud, it’s not a simple matter of just migrating to the next one.
Much in the same way you must separate on-prem workloads from the underlying applications and infrastructure they run on, moving between clouds is not usually straightforward, and there are a number of problems to solve before making the move.
That’s why there is an opportunity for companies that can help. The customer desire to be able to do this is real.
Make it work
David Linthicum, chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte, has worked with cloud technologies for almost two decades, and says the public cloud infrastructure vendors have varying approaches to multi-cloud.
Google, which finds itself far behind the cloud market-share pack in third place, embraced a multi-cloud strategy last year at Google Cloud Next when it announced Anthos, a way to move workloads between clouds.
“People leveraging public clouds will be doing it in a multi-cloud architecture. What Google is doing with Anthos is spot-on,” Linthicum told TechCrunch at AWS re:invent last year.
Amazon seemed more than a little resistant to the idea at re:Invent, pretty much avoiding the term in its presentations and literature. This didn’t escape Linthicum’s notice. “Eventually AWS will give in to a multi-cloud world. I was hoping they would do it in this conference. I wrote a prediction that they would do it, but I’m not seeing them building any tools to connect to non-AWS clouds. That’s the culture,” he said.
That could be because as market leader, Amazon doesn’t have the same motivation to share with other clouds as its competitors might. It wants customers to buy into their cloud, but customers are more likely to want to go with best-of-breed choices across cloud infrastructure providers.
To do that, Linthicum says, cloud companies must embrace cloud native and expand on common features that don’t change from cloud to cloud. He believes the cloud-native ethos could lead the way because it is about managing the cloud as a single entity, no matter where your data lives — but it will take all cloud vendors buying in to make that happen.
“Cloud-native is defined by anything not native to a particular cloud, not native to Amazon, Microsoft or Google. It provides commonality of layers, allowing you to leverage things to run across different clouds. Investing in that and planning around that is something hugely valuable,” he said. “And I expect to see more of that in 2020 and 2021.”
But there are some startups trying to help today.
Startups to the rescue
Like any problem of this scope, if there is demand, startups will try to provide a solution. Various companies are working to solve this portability problem, just as there are firms working to solve the cloud migration problem.
One way to think about this is by providing a neutral third party to hold that data, precisely the role taken on by cloud data warehouse Snowflake. CEO Frank Slootman says his company can store data as a central holding tank, freeing customers to move it wherever they wish. Snowflake has API connectors to all the major clouds to help.
Slootman identified a couple of reasons why companies could use his company’s product to facilitate a multi-cloud approach. “Number one, Snowflake is completely cloud-neutral and cloud-agnostic. And what that means is that Snowflake doesn’t know what cloud it’s running on. It’s completely isolated from the underlying architecture,” he said.
“Number two, you know we replicate across cloud regions and between cloud regions. So in other words, we have the ability to replicate data from Amazon to Azure to Google and all other possible combinations.”
He said having this ability keeps customers from getting locked into any particular vendor, because in theory they can move freely between clouds without having to repurpose data or applications.
Egnyte, a file-storage service that also focuses on security and governance, is another startup helping companies store files and move them between cloud vendors using their published APIs, something Egynte is well equipped to handle, says co-founder and CEO Vineet Jain.
“All public clouds store data in an object store data structure. By configuring this way they create consistent access to their data via published APIs. Egnyte leverages these APIs to easily move files between different public clouds,” he told TechCrunch. “It is our job as cloud service providers to be able to help them move their data efficiently and securely, without interrupting their day-to-day workflow. While that does come with its challenges, it is an integral part of the value we provide — especially during times like we are experiencing in the world right now.”
These are just a couple of successful, mature startups helping companies move data between clouds today. While there are challenges, it’s useful to know that the startup community is working to solve these issues.
But there is plenty of room for new startups looking to solve the range of related problems. Because the last thing companies want to do is repeat the mistakes of the last tech era and bring back vendor lock-in.