HYPERSCALE
LOCK-IN
Strategic risk
Years of AWS, Azure, or GCP commitments make change feel impossible. Egress, proprietary services, and contractual rebates trap your roadmap — and the people who built the stack feel personally invested in keeping it.
HOW LOCK-IN MANIFESTS
Egress fees as a tax on movement
Moving data out of a hyperscaler costs more than moving it in. Multi-petabyte estates can't be exported in any reasonable timeframe at standard egress rates.
Proprietary services with no analogue
Workloads built on AWS-specific managed services (DynamoDB, Lambda, Aurora) need re-engineering, not just re-hosting. Lift-and-shift isn't a path.
Contractual rebate traps
Enterprise discount programs (EDP, MACC) are structured to make moving spend feel like a financial loss. Boards rarely look past the rebate to the underlying cost.
Skills aligned to one stack
Years of investment in cloud-specific tooling, IaC, and certifications create cultural lock-in. Engineers feel that moving means losing their expertise.
HOW WE UNPICK IT
Map the lock-in surface
Catalogue every dependency on hyperscaler-specific services. Surface the workloads that lift cleanly, the ones that need re-engineering, and the ones genuinely captive.
Quantify true cost
Look past the rebate. Calculate full-stack TCO including egress, support, FinOps overhead, and the people-cost of staying. Compare against sovereign alternatives.
Wave-based migration
Move workloads in waves, smallest blast radius first. Each wave is independently reversible. The hyperscaler footprint shrinks as sovereign capacity comes online.
Re-skill, not replace
We bring your engineers along — Kubernetes, Terraform, OpenStack, Proxmox. The skills are portable, the tooling is open, the lock-in evaporates over time.
OTHER ENTERPRISE PROBLEMS
Unpredictable OpEx
Cloud bills swing month to month. FinOps overhead grows faster than the savings it produces.
Regulatory exposureCompliance & Sovereignty
APRA CPS 230, Essential Eight, IRAP, SOCI Act. Stronger controls over where data lives and who can access it.
Operational resilienceConcentration Risk
A single hyperscaler outage or policy change can take a critical workload offline. Boards expect an exit plan.
READY TO MAP YOUR LOCK-IN?
We start with a structured audit. Egress modelling, dependency mapping, and a phased exit plan.