Vendor lock-in, alongside security, are issues that have pervaded IT and software procurement, whether computing has been centralized or not. In the era of the cloud, with benefits ranging from scalability to speed, the hoped-for panacea has turned out to be less than expected.

For a while, the vendors and analysts thought they’d cracked it with the gloss of multi-cloud. At the start of 2018, Cloud Academy issued a whitepaper that looked to separate multi-cloud strategy from the...