Vendor lock-in: tools to support industrial digital transformation

The value of observability to avoid vendor lock-in and accelerate innovation

Do you feel trapped by third-party vendors controlling your critical data and systems? Do you need to boost your innovation and learning cycles without compromising control? The answer lies in observability.

Apple, Pinterest, Netflix and Airbnb recently faced million-dollar fees that highlight the relevance of adopting this practice. 

But let’s start from the beginning. “Vertiginous” is a word that accurately describes the expansion of the cloud that we operate daily. With such a movement, it is – at least – critical to maintain control over data and applications as part of a strategic company protocol. 

Under an observability-based approach, the certainty of avoiding falling into traps such as vendor lock-in and ensuring that it is you who controls the performance and state of your systems, is assured.

To size the problem, consider that 92% of companies have concerns about vendor lock-in in the cloud and 59% have already experienced difficulties migrating data or workloads, according to Flexera.

How to identify the vendor lock-in?

We live in times when even tricks have sophisticated names. Vendor lock-in, also known as “vendor lock-in”, is an unfortunate situation in which the customer becomes dependent on a product or service provider, who makes it difficult to migrate to other options with a contractual and monetary intention.

This occurs when a client’s tools, data, systems or applications are so integrated with a provider’s ecosystem that it is very complex or very expensive to switch to a solution from another provider.

No one, however, has to settle for the saying “a known evil is better than an unknown good”. Some of the signs with which you could identify an attempt at this practice are:

• Closed file formats that only work with vendor software
• Databases or cloud services that cannot be exported or migrated
• Custom IT infrastructure that relies on very specific hardware and software from a vendor
• Contracts or licenses that penalize changing suppliers

According to Gartner, more than 80% of organizations that migrated to the cloud face vendor lock-in issues. This is due to the complexity of migrating databases as they are configured.

As in any commercial dynamic, customer preference rules and anchoring it with premeditated dependencies without room for negotiation represents a risk that is mitigated with open standards and interoperable solutions.

The value of observability

Observability is not just about monitoring. In fact, it far transcends it because it allows you to obtain detailed — several layers deep — and actionable logging of your complex environments. With that, you can identify and solve root anomalies, optimize performance and make decisions based on real-time data.

While monitoring focuses on the health of systems based on predefined metrics, observability enables deep, contextual understanding of internal systems on raw, real-time data. That is why it becomes essential to avoid vendor lock-in.

With observability, you will also optimize performance and have an improvement in the user experience by anticipating and preventing interruptions, which reduces time and costs, supporting the continuity and strategic transformation of the business.

What if I already carry out monitoring?

The short answer is: “very good, but that’s not enough”. Speaking of the lean and industrial lean innovation ecosystem where the speed of iteration represents business value, it is impossible to delegate trust only to a monitoring process. 

Observability is designed to accelerate and deepen measurement with reduced learning cycles with the business intent of maintaining full control over your data.

Observability falls short when considered just an IT practice. In reality, it is a complex business strategy that goes far beyond monitoring and contributes to the company’s value proposition because it is based on the data sovereignty relevance and the acceleration of innovation.

A complexity that demands observability

We are in a time of expansion of the cloud environment and with it the adoption of edge architectures increases. Hence the complexity of IT systems and the consequent demand for an observability solution, not only for performance and security but as insurance to avoid any potential restrictions that could come from suppliers. 

At Ikusi, we are experts in advising and accompanying companies to have a robust and flexible cloud strategy, capable of keeping any threat — such as vendor lock-in — away, while the operation has the elements to maximize efficiency.

We invite you to learn about Ikusi Full Visibility with ThousandEyes, a solution designed to face the challenge of vendor lock-in and improve observability with analysis and automation tools for comprehensive monitoring of your applications and infrastructure.