Why You Need To Have An Exit Plan, Even For AWS

No matter if you are signed up with AWS, Microsoft, Google or IBM, business continuity should be a staple for cloud management, just as it has long been one for IT management.

Public cloud consolidation demands an exit plan.

Even as the cloud computing infrastructure market continues to consolidate around these four major providers, the IaaS, PaaS and private hosting is still a volatile market — in how larger companies maintain or grow their market share at the expense of smaller providers.

The current trend underscores long-term consolidation, and that is exactly what enterprises need to plan for.

If you or your company has picked a weak cloud provider, one that has not been able to establish a sustainable market share, it could turn off its cloud services a few years down the road.

It has happened before, when several small and medium sized IaaS providers left the market.

And it can happen again.

Sure, AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM are well funded companies that are not going to shut down their services without notice. But if the going gets tough, any of them can drop their cloud platforms — there are no guarantees in this market.

What if Google decides in some distant future that its relatively small market share is not worth the continued investments?

It is impossible to predict the technology market with any degree of certainty.

But a much better way to go about it is to have an exit plan, including which provider to migrate to, how to transition your data and applications, the related costs, and more importantly, the impact on your business operations.

The time to plan is now — not when disaster strikes.

Prepare for tomorrow. Today.