UK govt office admits ability to negotiate billions in cloud spending curbed by vendor lock-in

It’s one of the points I’ve been making since the beginning of enterprise cloud services. It’s not to say necessarily that a cloud service is bad, but you have no control (and often no easy way out) if prices jump (remember Microsoft changing their SQL database licenses from per CPU to per core – think it was that way around).

Quite often too, cloud providers use their own proprietary formats inside their cloud, so all works wonderfully, but what went out of the window was many governments’ requirements around open data standards. There was one very good reason for open data standards, and that was for easy portability to any other service, e.g. using ODF document standard and then moving from LibreOffice to, or from, FreeOffice.

Combine both of these and you’re in a tightish spot. You may also have very few skilled IT staff left, because all your services now sit in someone else’s cloud.

So, you just want to factor all of this in very carefully when considering whether to go into a cloud or not. We won’t even mention the UK govt’s experiences recently with Oracle…

See https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/04/uk_cddo_admits_cloud_spending_lock_issues_exclusive/
#Blog, #cloud, #technology, #UK, #vendorlockin