Vendor Lock-In and Cloud Portability in Serverless Environments: An Empirical Investigation with Special Reference to the Indian IT Industry

Abstract

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.