Always Stay Prepared to Lose Your Cloud Provider

We hear about mergers and acquisitions all the time in the tech world, especially with all the cloud options available. Maybe a big player wants a smaller company’s IP, or a company is trying to buy out its competitors, or any number of possibilities. It can be intimidating for a user when their cloud platform or any other service is bought out. Sometimes you may even lose your service’s offering. So, what do you do then?

As the cloud marketplace continues to grow, the predictability of said market will be chaotic. Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant on managed service providers predicts that this market will shrink in providers as it increases in size. Consolidation of options happens in any industry. Look at the film industry, Disney is working to acquire 21^st Century Fox, leaving only a handful of major studios left while film is more profitable than ever.

Antitrust laws don’t seem to matter anymore, so having a backup plan for an unexpected change in your cloud provider is important.

Service providers

As amazing as the cloud is, reliance on another company’s stability can be difficult. Twenty years ago, you could buy a software solution and own it. This, obviously, is no longer the case. Teams rely on updates, new services, new tools, etc. from their subscribed providers. It’s even possible that you store all your data in a cloud service, which could then be lost. A plan is crucial to maintaining stability within your organization.

Planning

Choosing a cloud provider is an intricate process that should be carefully thought out. Your backup plan needs to be as well. Maybe you found the best possible cloud provider or tool for your company, but that company doesn’t do well elsewhere. It’s important to recognize this risk and ask the proper questions. Ask your team if they would know how to react to a sudden loss of service. Would you lose everything?

Our backup and disaster recovery site can help you with specific backup related best practices but planning needs to be deeper than this. It’s a good idea to ask your cloud provider what their plan is if they unexpectedly go bankrupt or change service options. It’s possible to ensure stability by including these details in your cloud contract.

Make sure your cloud provider is clear about what happens to your data if there’s an unexpected end of service. Will they be able to transfer this information to you or your next provider, or will you be left in the dust?

Strategies

Planning for an issue like this is crucial, but it’s also important to have definable strategies. The most obvious is a multi-cloud approach. Not only will this approach improve your IT potential, it will make you safe from unexpected cloud issues.

Many companies are moving to a multi-cloud approach and there are various reasons. Maintaining safety in the cloud is one of the most prominent. It will increase the ease of migrating applications and data. It also makes it easier for your IT teams to transfer to a different cloud, as they’re already familiar with it.

The multi-cloud approach isn’t for every company, but it is a great option to prevent a potentially harmful situation. You can read more about a multi-cloud approach here.