The Cloud is supporting business agility through flexibility. Want to know how?  

There are many different types of Cloud technology out there, so it's important to have a strong awareness about your many choices before you start investing.

The cloud should be a platform for change. By taking an open approach to the Cloud, you can freely choose which combination of services and providers best suits your needs over time, to keep up with your company’s ever-changing requirements. 

If technology decisions you’ve made in the past make you feel glued in the present to specific hardware, platforms and applications, here’s some good news: In the cloud era, it doesn’t have to be like that. One of the big bonuses of the cloud is the ability to take agility to a whole new level, because it enables flexibility. 

Step 1: Avoid vendor lock-in
Remember that business requirements can easily change,  and so can the business model of your provider. Therefore different contracts may offer different terms and conditions with varied levels of flexibility. Some providers may hope to secure their revenue stream by tying down their customers. Often the smaller niche players develop a reliance on the customers they serve and therefore offer less flexible contracts, while larger providers have the scale to comfortably offer solutions where you don’t run the risk of locking yourself in. 

A key thing to keep in mind is that a move to the cloud must always bring flexibility. Just because you have selected a technology partner, that should never mean that you’re now stuck.

Google avoids lock-in with three pricing principles: There are no upfront costs, you only pay for what you use, and there are no termination fees. Pricing innovations such as rightsizing and sustained-use discounts help deliver an average savings of 35% for many compute workloads. Our storage prices average 21% less than competitors’ for online storage workloads.

Step 2: Stay open
Your business should be able to add new tools as requirements arise. An open cloud allows you to create services,  such as via containers, and to switch those components to whatever Cloud platform is most appropriate. The open Cloud makes it easier for your business to take advantage of new, innovative approaches to on-demand IT as they become available. 

Google believes openness matters more than ever. It avoids lock-in, fosters security and drives innovation. Open source is an enabler of open clouds because open source in the cloud preserves your control over where you deploy your IT investments. For example, customers are using Kubernetes to manage containers and TensorFlow to build machine learning models on premises and on multiple clouds.

Step 3: Spread your risk
Key in an open approach to Cloud services is Application Programming Interface (API). APIs are sets of subroutine definitions, protocols and tools for building software. They provide the hooks into systems and services, allowing your business to build on its existing work and to create iterative improvements in software developments. 

Open APIs are crucial because they give you every opportunity to take advantage of the agility associated with the cloud. By using open APIs, your business should be able to switch providers quickly and easy. 

To stipulate our approach to Cloud openness and APIs, we’ve shared our day-three Keynote on Google Next. Jeff Dean (Senior Google Fellow, Google Brain team leader) and Rajat Monga, alongside startups and the VC community, explain how they’re leveraging APIs and the Cloud to build the next wave of innovative products and services. Watch it now.

Openness and the Cloud go hand in hand
A move to the Cloud allows for a new state of mind: collaboration is no longer hindered by traditional constraints of enterprise IT such as siloed data and technological burdens. Cloud helps your business adopt openness and flexibility as the new way of working. By adopting open APIs across platforms, your firm can avoid lock-in to move freely towards an innovative and flexible future.

Read more about scaling with flexibility through open cloud.