Portability Goals Providing Location Adjacency
When we talk with our customers, there are usually numer-
ous organizational goals or incentives for portability. How-
ever, they generally fall into a few basic categories. Cloud providers operate at different levels in different
geographies. It is not unusual for an underserved company
location to find that they only have one realistic cloud avail-
able to them. By having the ability to move or replicate
workloads across cloud provider platforms, it is often possi-
ble to provide business capability closer to the point of
need to address issues such as performance and
availability.
Avoiding Vendor Lock-In
Most organizations try to keep their options open when it
comes to suppliers, and the cloud is no different than some-
thing as mundane as office supplies or janitorial services.
Maintaining an available source of substitute (similar and
readily consumable) capabilities with multiple cloud provid-
ers theoretically increases one’s negotiating power with
those providers. This economic principle of substitution is
well understood by business leaders and is the major driv-
ing force behind most multi-cloud strategies.
Mitigating Risk
Closely associated with avoiding lock-in is the desire to min-
imize the risk associated with operating critical IT work-
loads with a single provider. With every publicized account
of a public cloud outage or other similar event, there is
renewed interest in portability between vendors. In fact,
even with a single vendor, this portability goal is desirable
across multiple logical or physical locations.
Satisfying Vendor Preference
Organizations are increasingly finding that their customers
and business partners have preferences when it comes to
cloud vendors. The ability to provide application services
across major cloud platforms makes it more likely you can
serve users on their platform of choice, so you become
more attractive to customers and business partners. This is
especially true in situations where the customer or partner
has a significant need to integrate with data or other appli-
cations already present in a specific cloud platform.
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Portability Challenges
Although the industry has made it seem that cloud porta-
bility is easy, there are some significant challenges to either
overcome or accept.
Security / Compliance Concerns
The major cloud providers deliver solid coverage of the
common compliance frameworks and standards. However,
there are still variations in the types and levels of coverage
among providers, and these differences are sometimes crit-
ical when considering how to move workloads between pro-
vider platforms. If a specific security or compliance control
is not present in a provider platform, that could eliminate
that platform from portability consideration unless an alter-
native is found.
Data Gravity
Because portability is usually concerned with ensuring the
movement of applications and data, having access to the
appropriate data in all provider platforms is important. In
environments with a significant amount of data, moving
that data back and forth between provider platforms is
often not desirable. And while it is usually technically possi-
ble to access data in one provider platform from workloads
located in another, there can be significant cost- and secu-