© 2014 Avere Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. 1

Will You Become a Cloud Hostage? Preserving Flexibility and Mobility by Avoiding Cloud

Provider Lock-in

Scott Jeschonek

Director, Product Management, Avere Systems

October 2014

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Cloud is Now

Choose Your Cloud

Lots of contenders want your cloud investment. You’re ready—or have

already started—to benefit from the flexibility, savings, and business

opportunities the cloud model affords. But are you sure the provider you

choose today will be the same one you want next year or in five years?

What you can count on is that in time things will change—your business

needs will evolve, the ecosystem of providers will ebb and flow, service

terms will be modified, and innovation will keep you peeking beyond

your current cloud to see what else is out there.

What you don’t want is to be held hostage where you are. You want to

preserve the flexibility and mobility to go wherever your needs and

opportunities lead. In this paper we’ll briefly review the current market

and notable players in each of the public, private, and hybrid cloud

spaces. Then we’ll examine the potential each of your technology

decisions—the compute, networking, and storage elements of your cloud

solution—has for protecting your ability to move among providers. The

choices you make now can secure your freedom to go wherever future

business needs and best-provider prospects take you.

Infrastructure as a Service: No Longer Hype

According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle of 20141, cloud computing has

reached the “trough of disillusionment,” indicating that hype around

cloud computing has slowed, and the technology is becoming accepted

as a mainstream business practice. Tangible cloud options exist, and

steady adoption is imminent.

1 Gartner Hype Cycle 2014, http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/hype-cycles/

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Forrester Research2 offers similar conclusions. After publishing an

estimated 2014 cloud spend of $58 billion, Forrester revised its prediction

in April 2014, increasing the forecast by more than 20% to $72 billion to

suggest greater movement into the cloud than first anticipated.

Companies like RightScale and Cisco have published research pointing to

the same conclusion, namely that many companies are already adopting

some cloud into their infrastructure. The Cisco Global Cloud Index3 not

only forecasts high growth over the next three years, but projects that as

much as 63% of installed workloads will be running in cloud data centers

by 2017.

At this writing, Amazon’s AWS cloud leads the charge in the Infrastructure

as a Service (IaaS) space. IaaS is an offering that provides compute,

networking, and storage for rent and to which customers apply their own

OS, applications, and services. While Amazon does not publish specific

revenue associated with its cloud offering, the revenue appears to be part

of their “other revenue” category that has grown significantly year-over -

year. Google, IBM, and Microsoft are all actively ramping up their

offerings and growing their support of cloud offerings.

Evidence clearly suggests that cloud is no longer something in the distant

future. With that in mind, let’s investigate the general approaches to

cloud adoption: public, private, and hybrid.

2 Forrester Research, http://bit.ly/sdj-cloud-forrester. 3 Cisco Global Index 2012-2017, http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/global-cloud-index-gci/Cloud_Index_White_Paper.html

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Types of Cloud

Public Cloud

Public cloud providers include companies and offerings such as: Amazon,

HP, IBM, Google, Microsoft Azure, CenturyLink, Rackspace, and CSC. To

break down the current market, let’s look at the providers in three

buckets: The Giants, The Giant Contenders, and The Pack.

The Giants The Giant Contenders The Pack AWS

Microsoft Azure Google

IBM (SoftLayer) Verizon Terremark

AT&T CenturyLink

VMware HP

CSC Oracle

Rackspace Joyent

ThinkGrid RightScale

CloudSigma GoGrid

ElasticHosts SingleHop

The Giants bring significant talent and branding to the market, while The

Giant Contenders all are very big companies with the resources and

strategic alignments required to play in the cloud market. Providers in

The Pack are primarily start-ups or non-US-based companies striving to

make their mark in this growing space.

AWS is by far the current leader in public cloud. In the IaaS Magic

Quadrant published by Gartner4, Microsoft was the only other company

4 Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant, May 2014, http://blogs.gartner.com/lydia_leong/2014/05/30/the-2014-cloud-iaas-magic-quadrant/

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sharing the Leader quadrant, and its presence is easily missed due to its

distance from the upper-right corner position held by AWS.

Competition among companies continues to heat up as they rapidly work

to grow market share. This gives buyers the upper hand regarding price

and service; for the moment, contenders need enterprises more than

enterprises need them. Yet these favorable conditions will not last

forever. The cloud market has many competitors now, but as the market

matures, inevitable fallout in the form of failures, mergers and

acquisitions, and of course, wild successes will occur.

For example, in early June of 2014 and after losing a very large

government cloud deal to AWS, IBM announced the acquisition of

SoftLayer to solidify its cloud offering. If competition remains strong

enough for price and service to still matter, then consolidation may make

buying options easier and better. However, as many customers can relate

from experience, this is not always the case. As happened in many big

industries like airline and telecom, the number of players inevitably

shrinks. Loss of competitive options introduces uncertainty into buying

strategies as enterprises face likely price increases or reduced quality of

service.

In addition to the uncertain vendor outlook, enterprises have concerns

about security, compliance, loss of control, complexity, and other factors

as yet unknown.

Private Cloud

Enterprises concerned about data security or government compliance

may consider implementing their own private clouds. Vendors in this

space include Cisco, Citrix, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Red

Hat, and VMware. These vendors incorporate all cloud functions,

including compute, networking, and storage, and some provide their own

bundles of the popular OpenStack cloud infrastructure. Additionally, pure

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object-storage vendors such as Amplidata, Cleversafe, and SwiftStack can

provide the backend storage for those cloud-infrastructure solutions.

Private-cloud proponents cite many reasons for adopting this technology.

According to a 2014 InformationWeek5 survey, the top reasons include:

1. Significant operational cost savings

2. Significant capital cost savings

3. A compelling technical advantage

4. Lower cost to entry

5. Industry standards for product integration and management and

Successes at other organizations like ours (tied for 5th-ranked)

But implementing a private cloud is not without its challenges. The basic

technology is not a quantum leap from traditional on-premises data

centers, but the overall management of private cloud solutions does

require new skillsets, possibly including programming skills. Enterprises

will still be faced with infrastructure maintenance and staffing, property

management, and the complexity of running a data center as part of the

business. One argument for public-cloud adoption is to “get out of the IT

business” so the enterprise can focus on core, customer-oriented

business functions. With private cloud, the management of on-premises

resources would continue to be—and potentially become even more—

challenging.

Hybrid Cloud

A hybrid approach that uses both public and private cloud can allow an

enterprise to offset the disadvantages of each technology and benefit

from the advantages of both. With a hybrid cloud, enterprises enjoy:

5 InformationWeek 2014 Private Cloud Survey, http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/6/11795/Data-Center/Research:-2014-Private-Cloud-Survey.html

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• A flexible architecture

• The ability to maintain critical data locally

• The ability to leverage the economics of public cloud where it makes

sense to the business

• A check on infrastructure spend

• Control of where data resides

• The ability to develop a risk-management strategy for business needs

Figure 1 offers an example of a hybrid-cloud infrastructure for enterprise.

The flexibility of this type of architecture can provide options to mitigate

risks while offering cost savings and accessibility to compute and storage.

Figure 1 - Example of hybrid-cloud architecture for global enterprises

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Cloud Hostage Prevention

Merriam-Webster defines “hostage” as one involuntarily controlled by an

outside influence. A “cloud hostage” suggests an enterprise locked into a

specific cloud provider, even if that provider makes unfavorable changes

to terms or lags behind in technology innovation. Decisions made for

deploying data to the cloud—private, public, or hybrid—can impact an

enterprise’s ability to move to and from providers. So how do you

prevent lock-in and protect both flexibility and mobility? For each of the

primary components of IaaS (compute, networking, and storage), let’s

look at the potential for lock-in.

Cloud Compute

The market offers an abundance of products and technologies that help

enterprises spin up, tear down, migrate, expand, and scale compute

environments. With the availability of tools like Docker, Elastic Beanstalk,

Chef, OpenStack, Pivotal, and Puppet Labs, the compute element of IaaS

is not likely to hold you hostage to a cloud provider. Hypervisor

differences may pose a threat, but container-based deployments can

keep compute flexible and easy to automate, and allow for rapid

deployment. Standards are not solidified, but compute is already

transient.

Networking

A major revolution in the past few years has been the move to eliminate

heavyweight-networking equipment (that does not lend itself to easy

reconfiguration) in favor of a flexible, virtual-appliance model that can be

controlled programmatically. The proposed approach to achieving this

goal includes two major architectures: Network Function Virtualization

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(NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Engineers already have

the ability to configure and reconfigure networks problematically.

Networking is transient, and with these new technologies, moving

between cloud providers will be easier because of the ability to move

network functions or easily adopt a new provider’s network functions. For

these reasons, we can eliminate networking from the list of likely reasons

for being held hostage to a cloud provider.

Storage

So that leaves storage, our final candidate and also the potential captor.

Let’s investigate the reason why the implications of your storage strategy

may create lock-in conditions.

Storage is viewed as a commodity, and the cost for data storage will

continue on the same downward path it has followed since 1955.

Therefore, the overall cost of storage (in terms of bytes stored, excluding

CAPEX costs) does not represent an overall risk in the current competitive

environment.

In addition, storage technologies will continue to evolve as vendors

innovate to meet the ever-

increasing demands for capacity.

These innovations should aid in

maintaining the downward trends

in costs.

The potential for lock-in comes from the difficulties or costs of moving datasets. We’ve

established that we can spin up

compute and configure networking virtually at will, but we still need

storage—the element that will represent the bulk of your cloud presence.

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Enterprise data must be located where the compute can use it. While it is

inexpensive to store large datasets in the public or a private cloud,

moving datasets between or among storage providers can be costly.

Storage architectures and data mobility should be a major factor in

enterprise cloud strategies.

Even with the most diligent planning, enterprises can at some point

experience issues with a selected cloud provider. Lack of quality support,

escalating costs, and changing business environments such as mergers

and acquisitions or shuttered operations can drive a provider change—

and a major data migration. Consider the recent case of a Gartner top-

ranked provider—Nirvanix—that gave customers just two weeks to pull

their data before turning off its lights.

Enterprises do have the option to connect cloud providers over network

links. However, while networking speeds and capacity continue to

increase, demand may outstrip networking capacity such that large

datasets may not be easily relocated or accessed by compute solutions,

presenting new latencies and thus costs in time. In addition, it may not be

in your incumbent provider’s interests to optimize such links.

Global storage demands may also impact future flexibility. “The Internet

of Things” promises unprecedented data growth over the next three to

five years. IDC6 predicts a 50-fold increase between 2010 and 2020—

that’s a whole lot more data that must be physically saved.

On the other side of the coin, innovation is happening right now, and a

new provider may offer more perfect solutions for business needs. Your

company may want to move to a specific cloud provider to take

advantage of the right technologies.

6 IDC Digital Universe Study, sponsored by EMC, December 2012

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So what’s the key to preserving your freedom and flexibility to move

among providers? Data mobility.

Data Mobility

Data portability helps preserve the

ability the change vendors. To

avoid becoming a cloud hostage,

enterprises must make data as

mobile as possible. In 2012, the

General Accounting Office (GAO)

distributed its “Cloud First” policy

for Federal Agencies, emphasizing data portability as defined “to

preserve their ability to change vendors in the future.”

For any organization striving to preserve the ability to change vendors, a

recommended mobility solution should include three components:

1. An Edge-core storage topology to facilitate multiple sources of data

2. Data diversification to gradually move data between sources

3. Policy to selectively choose the data to be moved

Implementing a solution with these components enables gradual

movement of data that facilitates cost averaging over time.

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Figure 2 - Example of a hybrid storage topology using Edge filers

Information technology is rapidly changing, and cloud will be a key

component of near-term enterprise data center infrastructures. By

securing data mobility, businesses can avoid significant costs and

roadblocks, preserving sufficient service to users and customers most

efficiently through data compute and access. Architect wisely today, and

you’ll be able to move freely about the clouds in the future.

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About Avere Systems

Avere is radically changing the economics of data storage. Avere’s hybrid

cloud solutions give companies—for the time time—the ability to end the

rising cost and complexity of data storage via the freedom to store files

anywhere in the cloud or on premises, without sacrificing the

performance, availability, or security of enterprise data. Based in

Pittsburgh, Avere is led by veterans and thought leaders in the data

storage industry and is backed by investors Lightspeed Venture Partners,

Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital, and Western

Digital Capital. For more information, visit www.averesystems.com.

© 2014 Avere Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.