Dr. Asif Sharif
Managing Director
Jan 5, 2026
Moving to the cloud is no longer a strategic debate—it’s a practical timeline. Ageing on-prem systems are becoming harder to maintain, harder to integrate, and harder to secure, especially as project teams rely on more tools across scheduling, cost, risk, and design. Many organisations feel pressure to shift quickly to vendor-hosted clouds such as Oracle, Autodesk or Hexagon because they appear simple and convenient compared to traditional cloud application hosting services.
But convenience can mask new constraints. Vendor clouds often come with trade-offs: reduced customisation, new data-warehouse requirements, limited integrations, and less visibility into the systems you depend on every day.
Before migrating, it’s worth pausing to ask five critical questions.
1. Will You Need a New Data Warehouse?
When you move to a vendor cloud, you often lose direct access to the underlying application database. For teams running project controls software or cloud-based project management solutions, that creates an immediate challenge: existing reporting pipelines may stop working.
If you currently extract data from Primavera P6, EcoSys, or G2, those processes may not survive the migration. Vendor clouds typically restrict access to tables, schemas, or APIs, which means organisations suddenly need a separate data warehouse to pull everything together again.
This impacts both project and technology leaders:
For project teams:
Reporting becomes slower and less reliable.
Performance dashboards may no longer match what’s happening on the ground.
For IT teams:
New infrastructure is required for storage, transformation, and refresh schedules.
New threat vectors are introduced with unsupported, nonstandard end point and ports
Data governance becomes harder when sources are split between hosted and non-hosted systems.
Tip: Map every data source before you move. Confirm how your tech stack will connect once the application is hosted by the vendor. If you rely on blended datasets, budget for a new warehouse or a more unified cloud platform later.
Related Reading: The Death of the Data Warehouse: Why Continuous Data Transformation Is the Future
2. How Much Customisation Will You Lose?
Most on-prem systems evolve over years. Organisations build scripts, workflows, dashboards, and minor extensions that fit the way that business operates—not the way the vendor imagines they should operate. That’s a strength of on-prem: you can customise nearly everything.
Vendor clouds work differently. They standardise the environment to simplify support and upgrades. That standardisation removes flexibility.
Common examples of lost customisation include:
Bespoke integrations that won’t survive vendor updates
Custom fields or layouts overwritten during upgrades
Local scripts or scheduled tasks that can’t run in a SaaS environment
Tightly tuned configuration for performance or specific business rules
When those customisations disappear, teams often feel the impact immediately in delayed processes, reduced automation, and new manual work.
Tip: Audit every script, workflow, and custom field before you migrate. Categorise them as “business-critical,” “nice to have,” or “replaceable.” Anything in the critical column should trigger a deeper migration discussion.
3. Will You Still Control Integrations?
Most project organisations don’t work in a single system. They stitch together scheduling tools, estimating tools, risk tools, document control systems, BIM platforms, and ERP data. Integrations are the backbone of project delivery.
If you rely on tools such as Primavera P6, Autodesk, EcoSys, Powerproject, or SharePoint, those connections may break in a vendor cloud. Reasons include:
Limited API access or slower API performance
Additional fees to unlock integration functionality
Less restrictive security controls to allow multi-tenant access
Vendor policies restricting external connections
Version mismatches between systems
Siloed hosting that prevents cross-system data flow
When integrations fail, data becomes trapped. Schedules no longer match cost data. Risk logs diverge from real-time progress. Teams start managing projects through spreadsheets—precisely what cloud-based project management solutions are meant to eliminate.
Tip: Ask for a full integration map showing what will continue working, what needs rebuilding, and what is not supported. If integrations are core to your operation, you may benefit from a more open, unified cloud platform instead.
Related Reading: The Software Vendor Lock-In Trap: Why Your Cloud Should Stay Independent
4. How Much Visibility and Governance Will You Have? When you move to a vendor cloud, you gain convenience—but often lose transparency. The vendor controls the infrastructure, the performance monitoring, and in some cases, the administrative settings.
For project teams needing real-time performance insight, that creates gaps.
These gaps extend beyond performance and reporting. In many vendor clouds, organisations also lose control over where their data is stored, replicated, and backed up. Data may be moved across regions or jurisdictions to support vendor operations, resilience, or cost optimisation—often without explicit customer approval.
Common visibility challenges include:
Difficulty understanding what’s causing slowdowns
Limited reporting on uptime or root-cause analysis
Lack of clarity around cost drivers
No unified view of how applications, data, and integrations perform end-to-end
Limited control or clarity over data residency and replication
Uncertainty around which legal jurisdictions apply to project data
Difficulty demonstrating compliance with regional or client-specific data sovereignty requirements
This is where many organisations look for a unified project platform—a way to track performance, usage, spend, and governance across their entire environment. But vendor clouds typically give visibility into their application, not the wider ecosystem.
Tip: Ask vendors not only what you can see, but what you can control. Confirm where your data will reside, how replication and backups are handled, and whether you can enforce geographic and jurisdictional boundaries. If data sovereignty matters to your organisation or your clients, ensure governance extends beyond application-level reporting.
Related Reading: Finding Meaning in the Metrics: 6 Ways Project Controls Teams Can Prove Their Value
5. What’s Your Exit Strategy?
Vendor clouds make onboarding simple. Leaving is another story. They’ve got you by the data so to speak.
Moving out of a vendor cloud often means:
Extracting data through limited export functions
Rebuilding lost integrations, dashboards and reports
Re-establishing identity and access controls
Re-hosting applications in a new environment
Untangling licences, contracts, and dependencies
Most organisations don’t realise how hard it is to leave a vendor’s cloud until they reach the first renewal. That is the moment when the real limits show up. You only start asking about data exports, integrations, and re-hosting options when you are deciding whether to stay or move. That is when you learn what is possible, what is slow, and what is blocked. It is also the first time you compare costs with other options, which often reveals new fees or hidden effort. With the renewal deadline coming up fast, many organisations find they do not have the time or flexibility to move. As a result, they stay in a cloud that no longer fits the way they work.
A lack of exit flexibility also limits strategic agility. If your organisation adopts new systems, restructures programmes, or merges with another business, being locked into a closed cloud makes it difficult to evolve.
Tip: Before signing, ask direct questions about, and document in writing, data ownership, export formats, and migration support. Build exit costs into your business case—not just entry costs.
The Bottom Line
Cloud migration is inevitable. But where you land matters far more than when you move.
Vendor clouds offer simplicity, but often at the cost of customisation, integration freedom, and operational visibility. These trade-offs can slow down project delivery and limit your ability to connect applications such as P6, AutoCAD, and EcoSys into a cohesive, future-ready ecosystem.
A unified project platform gives you a different path—one that blends cloud scalability with full control over integrations, data, governance, and long-term flexibility. It supports the entire project landscape rather than a single vendor’s application.
A Better Alternative to Vendor Clouds: the Unified Project Platform
A vendor cloud solves one problem: where an application is hosted. A Unified Project Platform (UPP) solves the problems vendor clouds create: access, integration, visibility, control, and long-term flexibility.
A UPP sits above every hosted application—on-prem, vendor cloud, private cloud, or hybrid—and gives your organisation a unified way to manage them. Instead of isolating each application inside a vendor’s silo, the UPP connects them into a single, governed project ecosystem.
Here is what the UPP provides that vendor clouds cannot.
1. Keep all your data connected, no matter where apps live.
Vendor clouds restrict database access and often force you to build new warehouses. A UPP creates one governed data layer across all your applications, so your reporting continues to work, your data stays unified, and your analytics remain reliable.
2. Preserve your custom workflows and automations.
Vendor clouds standardise everything. A UPP protects the integrations, scripts, and processes your organisation has built over years—so your project operations keep running the way you designed them.
3. Maintain open integration across your entire project ecosystem.
Vendor clouds limit or block integrations across scheduling, cost, risk, and design tools.A UPP keeps Primavera P6, EcoSys, Autodesk, estimating tools, and BI platforms connected, even when each tool is hosted in a different environment.
4. Regain the visibility and governance vendor clouds remove.
Vendor hosting means vendor rules, vendor reporting, and vendor-defined SLAs. A UPP gives you a single pane of glass across every application, every environment, every user, and every integration—regardless of who hosts what.
5. Keep your exit options open.
Vendor clouds make onboarding easy and exiting difficult. A UPP preserves your flexibility, so applications can move between on-prem, vendor cloud, private cloud, or hybrid without breaking your integrations, identity management, or reporting.
6. Build a future-proof project ecosystem.
Vendor clouds only support their own software. A UPP supports your entire project landscape—schedule, cost, design, risk, field systems, and analytics—so your organisation can evolve without being locked into one vendor’s roadmap.
In short, a vendor cloud gives you hosting. A Unified Project Platform gives you control.
Put a Unified Project Platform Behind Your Cloud
Explore how LoadSpring’s secure unified project platform delivers the power of the cloud—without the limitations of vendor lock-in. Contact us today.
Related Questions
What is vendor lock-in?
Vendor lock-in is when an organisation becomes so dependent on a specific supplier’s technology, platform, or service that switching to another provider becomes difficult, costly, or disruptive. It often happens when proprietary systems, data formats, or integrations make migration complex or time-consuming. In a cloud context, vendor lock-in can mean being tied to one provider’s infrastructure or applications because moving data, workflows, or licences elsewhere would require major rework. Essentially, it limits flexibility and choice, making it harder to adapt as business needs or technologies change.
How do I avoid vendor lock-in?
To avoid vendor lock-in, focus on maintaining flexibility and control from the outset. Choose solutions built on open standards and open-source technologies to reduce dependency on proprietary tools. Make sure your data is portable—stored in formats that can easily be exported or moved if needed. Adopt a modular architecture and standardised processes so individual components can be swapped or upgraded without disrupting the whole system. Always review contracts carefully, watching for automatic renewal terms, restrictive migration clauses, and hidden data-access limitations. Finally, consider a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy to balance workloads across providers and prevent over-reliance on any single vendor.
What is a unified cloud?
A unified cloud is a strategic approach that integrates and manages disparate cloud environments (including private, public, and hybrid clouds) under a single, consistent platform or framework. The goal is to provide consistent operations, data management, security policies, and cost optimisation across the entire IT landscape, simplifying complex multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructures into a more cohesive and manageable system.