Bare Metal Cyber

The numbers on the slide are irresistible. One cloud provider is offering deeper discounts if you commit “all in” for the next five years: consolidated billing, lower unit costs, bundled artificial intelligence (A I), migration help, and a shiny set of executive briefings. Around the table, your teams are tired of juggling multiple platforms, finance wants predictability, and the account team is promising to “simplify your life.” The question is not whether the offer looks attractive. The question is whether you understand the captivity that comes with it. This is the narrated edition of “Platform Captivity: Life Inside a Single Cloud’s Walled Garden,” a Wednesday “Headline” feature from Bare Metal Cyber Magazine, developed by Bare Metal Cyber.

Platform captivity is what happens when a single cloud service provider (C S P) stops being just a place where you run workloads and quietly becomes the environment your business depends on. Over time, your architectures, your skills, your identity model, your monitoring stack, and even your security operations tune themselves to that one ecosystem. Inside the walled garden, life often feels smoother. Services integrate cleanly, invoices are tidy, and your teams become experts in that platform’s way of thinking. The more you enjoy that comfort, the less room you have to move when pricing, regulation, outages, or strategy start to shift against you.

Over the next twelve to twenty four months, single cloud concentration risk will stop being an abstract worry and start showing up in concrete decisions. You will see it in renewal negotiations where you are bargaining from a position of weakness, in attempts to meet data residency demands with limited options, in mergers where the acquisition lives on a different platform, and in tense moments when the provider’s roadmap and your own diverge. Security and technology leaders will be expected to explain not only how safe and resilient the current environment is, but how boxed in the organization has become and what it would realistically take to leave. From here, the story is about making that captivity visible, quantifiable, and governable before the walls close in further.

The seduction of a single cloud usually begins with all the right intentions. Standardizing on one provider promises focus: one primary relationship to manage, one commercial model, one way of doing identity, logging, networking, and controls. Teams get out of the business of translating between different cloud dialects and can go deeper on optimization instead. The provider leans hard into this narrative with migration credits, architectural guidance, and executive attention that is genuinely valuable. On the surface, it looks like trading complexity for clarity.

As the walled garden matures, the benefits become very real. Engineers learn how to exploit the native services well. Operations tightens up because there is a single dominant pattern for observability, for deployment pipelines, and for cloud native design. The security team aligns its controls to the platform’s primitives and starts to feel that it can finally get ahead of misconfigurations and drift. From a board perspective, you can talk about fewer vendors, cleaner dashboards, and a simplification story that resonates with both cost and risk committees. It feels like professionalization, not dependence.

Commercially, the comfort compounds. The more workloads you concentrate with a single C S P, the more short term negotiating leverage they appear to give you. Committed spend discounts, private pricing, bundled support, and access to “strategic” programs become part of your story to finance. You rationalize the growing dependence as responsible stewardship: buying in bulk, building depth of expertise, and unlocking economies of scale. The decision to double down feels prudent, not risky, because most of the benefits show up quickly while the costs remain invisible and deferred.

The subtle shift is that comfort becomes the default assumption behind every new project. Architects start from the provider’s reference blueprints. Product teams plan features around whichever managed services are easiest to consume. Security controls implicitly assume the same identity and logging models. Nobody issues a dramatic “thou shalt be single cloud” memo. The walled garden simply becomes the path of least resistance. Every step deeper makes future alternatives harder to justify on any time horizon shorter than a crisis, and that is exactly when your options matter most.

Lock in rarely begins with a bold strategic declaration. It begins with a series of small, sensible technical choices. A team picks the native message queue because it integrates cleanly with the existing functions. A data group moves fast on the cloud’s proprietary analytics service because it avoids the overhead of running a separate warehouse. The security organization leans into the platform’s own detection and response tools because they see telemetry others cannot. Each decision makes sense in isolation. In aggregate, those decisions sketch out the bars of the cage you will later have to negotiate your way out of.

The pattern underneath is straightforward. You move from using a provider as infrastructure to using it as your application and security runtime. Data resides in proprietary stores that do not have equivalent semantics elsewhere. Identity is modeled through the cloud’s own roles, groups, and policies, which then seep into your application logic and entitlement design. Event flows, orchestration, secrets management, and policy enforcement become tightly coupled to a single ecosystem. You may still say “we are cloud agnostic” in executive updates. The system diagrams and deployment pipelines tell a different story.

Newer “value add” services accelerate the handcuffing. Managed database flavors, serverless runtimes, opinionated container platforms, and embedded A I assistants all pull more of your stack into constructs that simply do not exist in the same way anywhere else. In theory, you could rewrite later to a more portable pattern. In practice, those refactors almost never win against visible new features on the roadmap. Leaders see revenue targets, regulatory deadlines, or customer expectations and fund whatever moves the needle fastest. Exit quietly becomes a cliff edge project that nobody wants to sponsor, instead of a continuous discipline baked into design.

Security architecture often deepens the dependency while trying to reduce risk. When your detection rules, response playbooks, and policy-as-code all assume one cloud’s interfaces and resource model, you are locking your defensive posture into that platform as well. Moving substantial workloads, even gradually, now means rethinking how you see events, how you decide on action, and how you execute those actions. That is where platform captivity turns into a resilience issue. Your ability to respond to new regulatory interpretations, commercial conflicts, or geopolitical events is constrained by the very services that made life easier in the first place.

Concentration risk is the most obvious example. It is one thing to depend heavily on a single software as a service (S A A S) provider for collaboration or customer relationship management (C R M). It is another to have your core production workloads, your critical data, your identity, and your observability all living under one hyperscaler’s roof. At that point, you are not just relying on their uptime. You are relying on their financial stability, their ability to navigate regulation on your behalf, and their incident response culture. A severe disruption or trust event at the provider level is not just a bad day. It can constrain your entire business strategy.

Jurisdictional and regulatory exposure sits alongside this. As more regions assert data residency, sovereignty, and sector specific rules, your room to maneuver depends on where your chosen platform can legally and practically operate. If your single cloud has limited presence or immature capabilities in a market you need to enter, that is a strategic blocker, not a technical nuisance. The same holds when regulators or major customers start asking pointed questions about concentration risk and exit strategies. Saying “we are all in on one hyperscaler” without a realistic alternative is no longer a reassuring answer.

Commercial leverage is the quiet risk most leaders underestimate. When a provider knows you cannot meaningfully move within a timeframe of several years, the balance of power in pricing and terms shifts decisively. Renewal cycles become less about competitive tension and more about damage control. Concessions you would resist in almost any other vendor relationship start to look inevitable. From a security and technology leadership perspective, this is where platform captivity intersects with governance. Your job is to make that loss of leverage visible, quantify it as part of risk, and feed it into the way your organization assesses big deals that deepen the cage.

When leaders grow uneasy about single cloud dependence, “multi cloud” often shows up as the comforting answer. Diagrams portray workloads elegantly distributed across providers, with traffic gracefully failing over and data flowing freely between platforms. In reality, much of what passes for multi cloud is decorative. A secondary disaster recovery (D R) footprint sitting idle on another provider, a handful of tactical workloads in a second cloud, or a vague plan to “move if we have to” does not translate into real strategic options. It simply adds small pockets of complexity without reducing the core concentration risk.

The central mistake is confusing diversity of providers with portability of capability. You can absolutely run different applications on different clouds and still be captive. If your crown jewel systems are deeply entangled with one provider’s data stores, identity, messaging, and security stack, pushing a few peripheral services to another platform does not change your leverage. At best, it gives you more talking points in renewal meetings. At worst, it fragments already stretched teams and introduces new integration and security failure modes without delivering meaningful escape capacity.

Real options look different. They begin with data portability: clear patterns for how data can be exported, transformed, and rehydrated elsewhere without months of manual work. They show up in control planes that are decoupled from any single cloud’s interfaces, so you operate policy, identity, and observability from above the platforms, not inside one of them. They involve deliberate constraints on the use of proprietary services in places where exit costs would be catastrophic if you ever had to move. Genuine multi cloud is less about where workloads happen to run today and more about how expensive and slow it would be to change that tomorrow.

For security and technology leaders, a simple thought experiment can expose the gap between mirage and reality. Imagine you had to move a critical service off your primary cloud within eighteen to twenty four months. Which parts of your current multi cloud story would actually help you do that? Anything that does not stand up under that scenario belongs to the mirage. The work ahead is to shift investment and architecture energy away from scattered experiments and toward option preserving patterns, even if most workloads remain on a single C S P for the foreseeable future.

Most organizations are already deep inside one provider by the time platform captivity becomes a serious concern. The instinctive reaction is often binary. Either you learn to live with it, or you launch a heroic, multi year escape program that almost nobody believes will finish. There is a more pragmatic path: negotiating from inside the fence. That starts with acknowledging the asymmetry. Your provider knows you are committed. Your goal is not to pretend otherwise but to turn that commitment into structured leverage instead of quiet dependence.

Inside your own organization, negotiation takes the form of governance and architecture guardrails. You will not rip out every proprietary service, but you can insist that new critical workloads follow patterns that are at least exit aware. Reference architectures can highlight when a team is about to embed yet another deep dependency. Security and architecture review forums can ask explicit questions about concentration risk when they approve major designs. Over time, you build a portfolio where some workloads are acknowledged as deeply captive while others are intentionally more portable. That mix gives you more nuanced options than an all or nothing move.

Security leaders have a particular role to play here. By framing platform captivity as a resilience and governance topic, you can pull it into risk registers, board conversations, and investment decisions. The aim is not to argue for abandoning the walled garden tomorrow. The aim is to document where the walls are thickest, where gates still exist, and what it would cost to build new exits. That clarity is a form of leverage in its own right, both with your provider and within your organization when someone proposes a deal that tightens the handcuffs further.

Designing for exit on day one can sound pessimistic, until you reframe it as basic resilience engineering. You already expect systems to tolerate component failures, malicious actors, and human error. Platform failure or captivity is just another dimension of the same problem. When leaders insist that new systems carry an exit story from the start, they are not planning to abandon their primary cloud next quarter. They are making sure that the cost and time to adapt to future shocks stay within bounds the organization can actually afford.

At the architecture level, exit aware design is mostly about separation of concerns. Business logic should live in code you own, not in proprietary low code builders scattered across a single platform. Data models and schemas should exist in version controlled definitions that can be realized on more than one storage technology, even if you start with a specific managed service. Identity and authorization should be abstracted behind clear interfaces rather than hard wired calls to one cloud’s roles and policies. You can still lean into native services. The key is to wrap them so that alternatives remain feasible instead of purely theoretical.

Control planes and policy present another leverage point. If your security policies, deployment orchestration, and observability tools sit entirely inside a single cloud’s console, every move you make is constrained by that environment’s boundaries. By contrast, investing in provider neutral policy-as-code, externalized configuration, and cross platform logging standards makes it easier to run mixed estates or migrate gradually. For leaders, this is an opportunity for security and platform teams to collaborate on governance standards that reward teams for choosing patterns which keep exit viable, rather than quietly punishing them with extra review friction.

Designing for exit on day one is also a cultural commitment. It means adding an exit lens to architecture reviews, asking what it would take to move a system in two or three years as routinely as you ask about availability or compliance. It means tracking the portfolio’s dependency depth over time, not as a scare tactic but as a planning tool for where to invest in decoupling next. When leaders normalize exit aware thinking, they send a simple signal: the organization is happy to live in this walled garden, but it will not pretend the walls are harmless or permanent.

At its heart, platform captivity is about surrendered options. The decision to go all in on a single cloud rarely feels like giving anything up. It feels like simplification, cost control, and focus. Only later, when pricing tilts, regulation bites, or strategy changes, does the organization discover how much freedom was traded away. The core mental model is straightforward: every deep dependency you create on one provider buys short term speed at the cost of long term leverage, and those costs compound quietly until exit becomes a fantasy slide instead of a credible plan.

Returning to that boardroom debate, the real question was never just whether the offer on the table looked attractive. The real question was whether you had a clear map of how captive you already were, which workloads could move, which absolutely could not, and what it would cost to rebalance. Leaders who internalize this shift start to see architecture, contracts, and security tooling not as local optimization problems but as levers in a broader negotiation about the organization’s future degrees of freedom. They stop tolerating designs that hard code a single provider’s worldview into the core of the business without an explicit, documented trade off.

For security and technology leaders, the next move is not a dramatic escape attempt. The next move is introducing an exit and concentration lens into how the organization plans, builds, and buys. That means asking teams where they are choosing captivity and where they are preserving options. It means inviting boards to consider platform risk alongside cyber, regulatory, and operational risk rather than treating it as a technical footnote. If there is one question to carry back to your own leadership conversations, make it this: in three years, will we be negotiating with our cloud provider from a place of choice or from the bottom of the garden wall?