Unpicking Vendor Lock-in.

A guide to understanding and mitigating switching costs when changing your Cloud Services Provider.

Introduction

Customers should be able to switch their Cloud Services Provider (CSP) if they wish.

A CSP, or vendor, should earn customer business by providing the best services and capabilities at the best price.

If a CSP makes it difficult to switch away from them (the essential element of vendor lock-in), it suggests that their services are not earning customer trust through the value they bring, and that they are restricting customer choice.

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we provide customers with full control, ownership, and portability of their data, and allow customers to quickly move to another CSP should they choose to.

We never want to trap customers with lock-in tactics such as fixed-price, mandatory long-term contracts, or technical hurdles to changing CSP that amount to vendor lock-in.

We want customers to stay with us because we offer the broadest choice of the best cloud services.

Our outlook is that our customers are loyal to us right up until the moment that somebody else offers them a better service.

This drives our customer- obsessed approach to innovation, and ensures we earn customer trust on a continuous basis.

This whitepaper looks at what customers should require from CSPs so they have the freedom to choose the innovative services they need, coupled with the ability to turn things off and move — should they decide to do so.

It provides a practical approach to defining, understanding, and eliminating sources of vendor lock-in.

The commentary in this paper is based on AWS’s many years of experience in delivering a secure cloud infrastructure to millions of customers worldwide.