Big Data in the Cloud: Avoiding Vendor Lock-in

More enterprise application and big data vendors are pursuing a cloud-agnostic strategy -- supporting AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Big data platform provider Hortonworks is taking that strategy one step farther. Avoiding vendor lock-in has become a major concern in the cloud era. If you deploy your infrastructure in one vendor's public cloud, say Amazon AWS, what will you do if the service fails to meet your standards or if the prices increase? What if the features you need are no longer supported? Sure, there are a couple of other big public cloud providers -- Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. And more vendors are making sure that their technologies are supported across multiple public clouds. But it can be complicated and time consuming to move your applications and data from one cloud to another. Don't expect the public cloud vendors to make it easier. They don't want to lose your business to a competitor. Containers are making it easier for organizations to move their workloads from cloud to cloud. But different public cloud vendors use different schemas and security set ups. Therein lies an opportunity for other vendors, however. "We've kind of joked that it's easy to get data into the cloud, but really hard to get it out," said Arun Murthy, co-founder and chief product officer at Hortonworks, in an interview with InformationWeek.