For well over a decade, hyperscale cloud technology has been the default infrastructure platform for businesses, promising unmatched scalability, flexibility and convenience. Over the last couple of years, however, the number of businesses heading for the exit when it comes to hyperscale cloud has slowly increased, with the tide turning in favor of alternative infrastructure solutions.

Providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure remain strong players – and they certainly have their strengths – but businesses are recognizing that a fully hyperscale cloud set up is not essential or often conducive to IT infrastructure that doesn’t eat into a business’s bottom line.

A staggering 94% of IT leaders have been involved in some form of cloud repatriation project in the past three years as they look to better balance their costs and diversify their infrastructure stack. The problem is, despite many businesses looking to move away from hyperscale cloud, very few are yet to formalize an exit strategy.

So, how can organizations develop an exit strategy that untangles the tight knots of vendor lock in that hyperscale cloud providers are so good at creating? It’s an important question that all companies need to consider, even if they have no immediate plans to migrate elsewhere.

The cloud problem

Despite the attraction of free credits and promises of unparalleled flexibility and performance, hyperscale cloud is not the best option for every type of organization. In fact, unless a company is one of the Netflix or Amazon Primes of this world, it is unlikely to need hyperscale cloud to make up 100% of its infrastructure stack. That’s because hyperscale cloud is designed for unpredictable scale and most businesses can predict, at least on some level, what their scaling patterns look like. Even businesses that are impacted by peak periods – say Black Friday or the Grand National – will have a regular baseline of users. 

Hyperscale cloud is great for these peak periods. It gives businesses a way of bursting capacity for short periods of time quickly and efficiently. But when that additional capacity isn’t required and it’s back to business as usual, hyperscale cloud is an incredibly expensive and complex option to support that baseline. 

Then there’s the issue of vendor lock in. The free credits eventually run out and when they do the bills start rolling in. The problem for businesses is that they are now a year or two in and their infrastructure has become deeply entwined within the hyperscaler’s platform and specific products, making it far more difficult to migrate away. 

Why an exit strategy is essential

If a business does choose to go down the hyperscale route, my advice is to formulate an exit plan before onboarding. It’s a key part of contingency planning and should be thought through and finalized before any vendor contract is signed.

A cloud exit strategy acts as an insurance policy for events that are both inside and outside of an organization’s control. For example, new legal requirements in a particular region may bring changes that make hyperscale cloud an unsuitable infrastructure platform of choice. Similarly, continuous service outages could impact the ability of a business to deliver a product or service, and there’s always the risk of support for a certain application or service type being withdrawn by a hyperscale cloud provider. While these scenarios aren’t unique to hyperscale cloud providers, the vendor lock-in often created by hyperscalers makes it especially difficult to move to alternative solutions. 

Whatever the reason, having a cloud exit strategy in place arms businesses with the negotiating power needed to navigate a better or alternative deal, or the ability to withdraw from a cloud service entirely. It all comes down to avoiding vendor lock-in by preventing dependency on a single provider.

How to develop an exit strategy

Many businesses simply want to pick up their infrastructure and move it out of hyperscale cloud. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple or as quick as that. And neither is creating an exit strategy, which requires a full assessment of current cloud usage, infrastructure requirements, future business needs and exit paths. 

An organization should bring together representatives from each area of a business, ranging from the IT leadership and technology architecture teams, to procurement and sourcing, legal and compliance, and finance. Together, they need to understand how the current infrastructure set up is designed and the specific servers that are being used. They also need to carry out a detailed audit of what’s included in their monthly bills, any major inefficiencies, and details of platform integrations and tightly coupled systems. Having this information will make it far easier to plan out a phased exit from hyperscale cloud, or better facilitate a seamless move to a smaller, private cloud environment.

As part of their auditing work, stakeholders should also research alternative infrastructure solutions that would enable the business to achieve its planned performance outcomes. Make sure to look at all options – on-premises and colocation, bare metal hosting, and hybrid solutions with private cloud environments.

And lastly, any exit plan should budget for migration costs, which are often overlooked. The budget should include the cost of hardware for on-prem and colocation options, the cost of hosting for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) options, data migration fees, labor costs, post migration expenses and costs of any service overlaps. It is very likely that a business will be running two infrastructure environments simultaneously for a period of time until it is confident that the new ecosystem is running correctly. Comparing the current infrastructure with the projected long-term ROI of a new infrastructure solution is particularly important if a hyperscale cloud migration is to be driven by cost-optimization alone.

Navigating the challenges

It goes without saying that migrating complex IT environments is likely to encounter problems, meaning that no business – regardless of how prepared they are – can ensure a completely faultless exit strategy. 

If IT infrastructure is built around a single hyperscale cloud vendor, there is a far greater chance of encountering difficulties. For example, the applications or services that are used in hyperscale cloud may not be supported on other platforms, making incompatible technology one of the most common issues encountered during a migration. The more cynical of us could say this is the hyperscale cloud vendor’s plan all along; the more difficult it is to leave, the far more likely an organization is to remain.

In today’s climate of waning hyperscale dominance, it’s not a question of whether a business will need a cloud exit strategy, but when. And I would urge any business that is with a hyperscale cloud provider or considering working with one, to get an exit strategy in place sooner rather than later. 

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