Key Takeaways:
- Understanding the difference between vendor lock-in and lock-out is essential for data control: Lock-in can restrict flexibility and innovation, while lock-out can result in sudden loss of access to critical data or services. Both pose real risks to long-term data strategy.
- Portability and vendor flexibility are key to future-proofing your data management: Choosing technologies with open, portable formats helps reduce switching costs and gives businesses more control over where and how their data is stored, moved, and recovered.
- Effective data strategy starts with knowing your data — what’s critical, where it lives, and how it’s protected: Identifying mission-critical data and aligning it with the right protection policies (RTO, RPO, backup frequency) ensures faster recovery and smarter resource allocation.
- Lifecycle data management is central to good data hygiene and cost control: Understanding and classifying data, including redundant, obsolete, or trivial data (ROT) allows teams to optimize storage, improve resilience, and eliminate waste.
- Lock-in decisions impact more than cost. They influence innovation, risk tolerance, and recovery readiness: IT leaders should evaluate vendor choices not only for today’s needs, but for how they enable access to new technologies, scalability, and business continuity tomorrow.
First, let’s take a quick look at the complicated nature of lock-in versus lock out. Vendor lock-In occurs when a company gets stuck relying on a specific technology or service from a particular cloud provider. This makes it difficult and expensive to switch providers or technologies. It’s a bit of a trap when you become too dependent on one company.
On the other hand, vendor lock-out happens if a company loses access to its data or services supplied by a cloud provider. It can happen if there are disputes, payment issues, or problems on the vendor’s side. This situation can resemble being banned from your own digital tools and information.
We’re going to discuss ways to handle these situations with agility, and nobody knows that better than our host, Leah Troscianecki; Product Marketing Manager at Veeam, and our guest, Michael Cade, Field CTO, Cloud Strategy at Veeam. They’ll share insights and offer guidance to companies that find themselves having to make those tough decisions with long-term consequences.
Q: Why are vendor relationships such a big topic right now?
Leah: We’re at a challenging point in our industry, given the dynamic and unpredictable geopolitical changes taking place. The technology industry is evolving at a breakneck speed and forcing us all to take a step back and really analyze vendor relationships.
How are we evaluating these relationships from a contract and licensing perspective? From a technology and interoperability viewpoint? In terms of future planning? The answers to these questions carry long-term weight that can end up on your shoulders.
Q: Can we dive a bit deeper into vendor lock-in and lock-out — a brief primer on concepts and consequences?
Michael: Sure! Basically, we are, in the industry, laser-focused on what those terms mean to portability. For example, if you’re locked in, how do you go elsewhere in your decision journey to optimize benefits? What’s the smartest way to make changes?
Historically speaking, a fellow named Kelsey Hightower became the first Kubernetes evangelist and initiated this terminology of ‘lock-in and lock-out.’
Q: For example, if you’re ‘locked in’ to a particular cloud vendor or a backup vendor, what are you locking yourself out of?
That’s a great question. The decision is very consequential for provider and customer. Do you want your data to be locked in? Now I’m just coming up on ten years at Veeam, and one differentiator we had at the start of that decade was the flexibility of our portable data format. In other words, if you choose no longer to be a Veeam customer — for whatever reason — you have a major advantage: an escape hatch. You don’t have to pay a maintenance fee to be able to recover your workloads and longer backups.
Q: Why is offering that flexibility and freedom the best way to operate?
Michael: It’s only fair. You should have the ability to walk away and leverage other paths if the first one hasn’t kept up with innovation or expectations. So, I think these lock-in and lock-out issues are about innovation, cost, and risk.
Q: What are the challenges, risks, and nuances of vendor lock-in?
Leah: Those situations can really get you stuck in a relationship that may be pretty limiting in flexibility. What are the consequences? For one, a potentially high cost in switching. If a solution lacks interoperability, you may have to go all in on certain clouds for most offerings. Now there may be a major contractual obligation that you can sort of ‘weaponize’ in your favor. But regardless, contracts are always going to be a handcuff experience one way or another.
In particular, let’s focus on innovation and vendor relationships — and of course that brings in data ownership as well. It’s essential to observe physical media pieces in ways that ensure our data itself doesn’t get locked in, for example.
Q: What other considerations accompany the risk of lock-in?
Leah: Well, there are certainly complex costing and budgetary concerns. With lock-in, you might find yourself wrestling with high switching costs. However, if you’re in a position where you can move from one vendor to another (from a virtualization point of view), you’re going to have the critical freedom of being able to move that workload and potentially save costs. That’s if the timing is right on those platforms as well.
Q: How does this perspective translate to data management and strategy?
Michael: We’ve blown the walls off the data centers! That means not having to exist in one location anymore but rather having our data spread across all these multiple platforms. And I think the question that I asked in that webinar was: do you understand your data? What is the most critical part of that data? We still need it, but it’s probably not as important as you conceptualized — especially when bad things happen. Nevertheless, it’s vital that you know where your most critical data is.
Q: Do you have some advice on the best way to locate your critical data?
Michael: The answer to that starts with the creation of your data itself. And that’s something we’ll talk about: lifecycle data management. Understanding your data is key to a lot of things —how you protect that data; how you move it; where it is available; and a whole catalogue of other good stuff.
Q: Can you wrap up how all of these ideas connect for IT leaders?
Michael: Ultimately, I’d line these ideas all up and hook them into each other, starting with ‘that application.’ It always has to start with that application, whether it’s on Kubernetes, on a virtual machine, on a physical server — it has to start there, whether you’re building or buying. Then you have to run it somewhere: that’s infrastructure lifecycle management. You’re going to build your infrastructure, perhaps manually. Or maybe you’re going to use infrastructure as code or other automation tools. Then you’re going to manage that ongoing continuous lifecycle.
Q: How does this infrastructure benefit a company?
Michael: It allows you to collaborate, to change, to look at that redundance — we use ROT, from an acronym point of view is your data, and part of your lifecycle management. It’s the redundant or the obsolete or the trivial data. And it’s about understanding: ‘well, do we need it anymore?’ This returns you to a hygienic way of understanding your data: if you don’t need it, get rid of it because it’s probably costing you money to store it somewhere. And then make sure that the data your retain is the highest quality data; that it’s residing on the most efficient storage; that it’s being protected and providing resilience.
For more information, watch the full video:
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