94% of IT Leaders Fear Vendor Lock-In. Most Are Still Doing It Anyway.

A recent industry survey found that 94% of organizations are concerned about cloud vendor lock-in — nearly universal anxiety. And yet the same data shows most of those same organizations keep building deeper into a single provider's proprietary services, because the alternative is slower and more expensive in the short term.

This is the quiet hypocrisy of cloud strategy: everyone agrees lock-in is risky in the abstract, but almost nobody acts on that belief when it's time to actually choose a managed database, a serverless framework, or an AI service. The convenience is too good, and the "we'll deal with portability later" plan rarely survives contact with a shipping deadline.

Here's my actual take: lock-in avoidance as a blanket strategy is mostly theater. You cannot meaningfully multi-cloud every layer of your stack without taking on massive operational complexity — and most teams don't have the headcount to run two equally mature platforms in parallel. What separates the teams who get burned from the teams who don't isn't avoiding lock-in. It's knowing exactly which parts of their stack they've locked in on purpose, and which parts they drifted into without ever deciding.

The real failure isn't choosing a vendor's proprietary service. It's not knowing you made that choice until the exit cost shows up on a slide during a renewal negotiation.

Genuinely curious: has your org ever actually executed an exit plan from a cloud service, or is "avoid lock-in" mostly something people say in meetings?

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