CIOs Say They Want to Avoid Vendor Lock-In, but Most Are Pretty Close to It

The desire to avoid vendor lock-in is real: about two-thirds of CIOs say they would like to use public cloud services (storage, compute, other services) from several different vendors. But few are pulling it off. Bain research finds that in 2020, 71% of companies standardize on one provider’s public cloud. And the other 29%? They may use multiple vendors, but they still spend, on average, 95% of their cloud budget with just one cloud service provider. What’s more, the average company uses more than 50 different native cloud services from its primary provider, making it an immense challenge to ever realize true, cross-cloud portability. Given all of this, vendors that are focused on solutions to manage hybrid cloud across multiple providers should be sure to emphasize their capabilities in other hybrid-cloud use cases that are more “here and now.”