Written by our Master Niek de Jong
One of the great opportunities scale ups have is that they have a greenfield opportunity to build their company including the choices they make around their IT.
The past few years I increasingly met companies which are completely locked-in by their cloud provider mostly AWS, Microsoft or Google. These cloud-services run reliably and are complemented with a whole range of value-added services which add value but at the same establish the lock-in and make it very difficult to move to another cloud provider.
This lock-in wouldn’t be such a big issue if there weren’t, al least, three considerable downsides in using a single Big-tech source for your cloud services.
Single-sourcing stimulates inertia both at the provider as the customer
In other industries a multi-vendor policy is the standard because this serves multiple purposes.
(1) It keeps suppliers extremely competitive because they have to fight for their share of wallet, leading to better prices and service
(2) The skill of working with different suppliers is embedded in the company/tooling making it easier to switch when one of the providers is underperforming.
Google predicts :”… we’ll see 80% or more of enterprises adopt a multicloud or hybrid IT strategy. Cloud customers want options for their workloads” (Read more here).
Big tech companies eat up huge amounts of (green) energy and waste the residual heat
The energy consumption of data centers is huge, already 4% of the Dutch energy consumption, more than the city of Amsterdam, half of all the green energy available.
This would not be such a big issue if the datacenters would re-use the residual heat. Several initiatives have proven this is possible, e.g. Leafcloud is able to re-use at least 50% of the energy used for the datacenter and is heating apartment buildings with it. Read more here.
Moving data to American owned tech companies is risky
All national privacy regulators of the European Union recommend that companies keep data from EU citizens out of US hands if they are not completely sure about data security. It is wise for data processors to look for alternatives to American suppliers. Read more here.
Therefore my strong advice to scale-ups is:
Adopt a multicloud strategy and while selecting your cloud providers and pay special attention to if they are re-using residual heat and if they are based in the EU or USA.
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