Lock-in is not a healthy model. A company can lock in customers by making parts of service so proprietary that moving elsewhere becomes a very disruptive and expensive choice. It’s essentially an artificial inconvenience. It may inspire feelings of elitism among some customers, especially with consumer brands, but it’s not a situation business customers appreciate.
The practice leads to at least two major consequences. It dampens emphasis on good customer services and reducing churn, since customers are now just shy of being product hostages, and it limits agility and innovation. From car spares to phone apps, lock-in tends to favour the supplier, not the customer. Technologists know lock-in is a constant risk that results in supporting legacy systems and spending more on keeping the lights on.
Perhaps worse, lock-in creates stagnation inside the customer’s environment, says Karl Fischer, Automation Lead at Obsidian Systems: “If you’re locked into a specific way of doing things, you can get stuck there.
It is unfortunate though that many decision makers (the non-tech folk) get very caught up in the marketing proposals of opex vs capex, fewer local skills required, etc. But they don’t think about exiting a cloud, interoperability, open standards, abstraction, etc.
There are ways of leveraging cloud without necessarily getting locked in. But realise that if you have become locked in, it can be very difficult (read expensive and time-consuming) to exit or migrate elsewhere, especially if your data is now locked into that cloud in a proprietary format. With the type of investment in involved, it may also well be worth getting an independent consultant to consider the pros and cons, and specifying what exactly what your requirements are.
I know this is not a brand new article, but in discussion recently with the author, he reminded me about it.
See https://www.itweb.co.za/content/rW1xL759wo57Rk6m
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