IT leaders fear vendor lock‑in
A survey found 94% of IT leaders fear vendor lock‑in, driving a shift from 'cloud only' toward hybrid infrastructure — a board‑level risk now affecting architecture choices. Presenting hybrid strategies as risk mitigation is becoming a stronger executive narrative reported.
Parallels’ 2026 State of Cloud Computing found 46% of respondents cited uncertain product roadmaps and 57% flagged fears over future vendor support, shifting selection criteria toward exit options and [flexibility parallels.com]. Parallels also quantified EUC fatigue: 85% of organizations spend one to ten hours per week managing VDI and 68% said IT staff time is the single biggest hidden cost, accelerating interest in alternative DaaS and platform [changes parallels.com]. Rackspace’s 2025 State of Cloud survey of more than 1,400 IT decision‑makers found over 90% plan significant cloud strategy changes and 48% said hybrid cloud will be critical to IT operations in the next 12–24 [months rackspace.com]. Rackspace further reported 69% of organizations had considered repatriating workloads, with data security (50%), better integration with existing systems (48%), and cost savings (44%) named as the top drivers for repatriation [decisions rackspace.com]. Gartner’s 2025 Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure Magic Quadrant lists AWS, Microsoft, Broadcom (VMware), Oracle and Nutanix as leaders and includes a planning assumption that 55% of enterprises will initiate proofs of concept for VMware alternatives by [2028 virtualizationreview.com]. An actionable exec‑update template reflects these trends: present a workload‑by‑workload risk‑and‑cost matrix (a practice Rackspace attributes to “Cloud Leaders”), enumerate concrete exit options, and propose a 4–6 month pilot window—the same implementation horizon 53% of Parallels respondents said they expect to execute [within rackspace.com]. Tie automation asks to measurable outcomes: Parallels found 47% prioritize AI for issue detection and 41% for automated patching, so board KPIs should include incident‑detection rate and percentage patch automation coverage as primary indicators of operational [improvement parallels.com].
