Vendor Lock-in and Cloud Computing at Seven Seas Technologies Group (Sst)

Abstract

Over the past two years, major cloud vendors including Bluelock, Microsoft, Joyent, Rackspace,Terrernark and Amazon Web Services are all experiencing slow client growth for their cloud services. This has been attributed to clients fearing being locked-in by cloud vendors and it has hampered the selling of cloud computing to enterprises. Cloud computing has been evolving over the decades aided by the development and improvement of other complementing technologies such as parallel computing, virtualization, grid computing, software interoperability and webbased computing. However its adoption by enterprises which would benefit from its robust qualities remains hampered by the threat of vendor lock-in. Majority of the studies carried out in the past in relation to cloud computing have concentrated on adoption of cloud computing by different sectors such as the banking sector, mobile sector, NGO sector and publicly listed firms.However, this research is different because it seeks to identify the role of vendor lock-in on hampering the selling of cloud computing to clients. The general objective of this research study was to investigate how vendor lock-in may have hampered the selling of cloud computing services at SevenSeas Technologies. This study adopted a descriptive research design in collecting and analyzing data. Majority of the respondents felt that vendor lock-in hampers the selling of cloud computing services to clients. From the study it can be concluded that vendor lock-in plays a major role in hampering the selling of cloud computing services to clients. The study shows that cloud service vendors use a variety of lock-in strategies to lock in clients thus making it costly and difficult to move services to another vendor. The study recommends that cloud service clients take the advantage of deploying their services and data on multiple cloud computing providers so that failure of a single service provider does not affect the customer data.