Article
Vendor Lock-In and Cloud Portability in Serverless Environments: An Empirical Investigation with Special Reference to the Indian IT Industry
Cloud computing has fundamentally transformed enterprise information technology infrastructure over the past two decades, yet the phenomenon of vendor lock-in continues to constrain organisational agility and architectural freedom. This paper reports findings from a mixed-method empirical investigation involving 306 information technology professionals drawn from organisations operating across India's major technology hubs. The study examines how cloud service model abstraction correlates with perceived vendor lock-in severity, how the emergence of serverless computing specifically Function-as-a-Service architectures has intensified portability challenges, and what role open portability standards and cloud-agnostic tooling play in mitigating lock-in risk. Four hypotheses were tested using chi-square analysis, one-way analysis of variance, and Pearson correlation. Results confirm that vendor lock-in severity increases significantly as the cloud service model transitions from Infrastructure-as-a-Service to Platform-as-a-Service to Software-as-a-Service (χ²(6) = 38.742, p < 0.001). Serverless computing introduces the most acute portability constraints among all cloud deployment paradigms, with 68.3 per cent of serverless practitioners identifying provider-specific event trigger formats as a major migration barrier. Open standards adoption including containerisation, infrastructure-as-code, and Kubernetes — demonstrates a moderate but statistically significant positive correlation with lock-in risk reduction (r = 0.487, p < 0.001). The paper concludes with eleven actionable recommendations for cloud consumer organisations, cloud service providers, and Indian regulatory bodies, addressing the urgent need for an India-specific cloud portability governance framework.
