When choosing an AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP), most organizations focus on immediate benefits: faster deployment, expert guidance, and managed operations. But there’s a critical question that often gets overlooked until it’s too late: What happens when you want to leave?

In the AWS ecosystem, MSPs take vastly different approaches when building customer-specific landing zones and cloud management platforms. Some approaches preserve your freedom and flexibility. Others quietly build the walls of a gilded cage.

The Two Paths: Open Standards vs. Proprietary Platforms

The Open Approach: AWS Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA)

AWS Landing Zone Accelerator represents the gold standard for customer independence. As an open-source solution built on AWS CDK and CloudFormation, we deploy LZA to provide several critical advantages:

• Complete transparency: All infrastructure is defined as code that you can read, understand, and modify
• No licensing fees: Open-source with no proprietary components
• AWS-maintained: Continuously updated by AWS to keep up to date with new services and features
• Industry standard configuration: With multiple documented sample configurations, you do not need to start from scratch.
• Full customer ownership: Deployed directly into your environment with complete access to the Infrastructure as Code
• Exit-ready from day one: If you ever want to manage it yourself or switch MSPs, you own your landing zone configuration

At Cloudar, we’ve built an entire landing zone practice around LZA precisely because we believe customers should never feel trapped. Your AWS foundation should be an asset you own, not a chain that binds you to any single provider.

The Proprietary Approach: Custom Orchestration Platforms

In contrast, many MSPs have developed proprietary cloud management platforms that create significant lock-in. These are often marketed as “revolutionary” or “next-generation” platforms that promise to make cloud management easier with “just a few simple clicks” or web-based portals that abstract away complexity.

The convenience is real. The long-term cost is hidden.

Here’s what proprietary platforms typically involve:

• Black box deployment: Resources are created through proprietary tooling that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure
• Dependency on custom APIs: Your operations become dependent on the MSP’s platform rather than native AWS tools
• Limited portability: Moving to another MSP or bringing management in-house requires re-platforming
• Knowledge gap: Your team never develops deep expertise in AWS native tools because they’re shielded by the abstraction layer
• Commercial leverage: The MSP knows that switching costs are high, affecting pricing negotiations and service quality over time

The Lock-in Mechanisms You Need to Watch For

1. Custom Landing Zones Without Source Code Access

Some MSPs deploy your resources using “their” landing zone—a pre-configured multi-account setup built with proprietary Infrastructure as Code that remains their intellectual property. When you want to leave, you inherit an AWS environment you don’t fully understand, configured by tools you can’t access.

The Cloudar difference: We can deploy LZA directly into your AWS accounts. Every CloudFormation stack, every configuration file, every security baseline—you have access to it all.

2. Web-Based Orchestrators That Become Operational Chokepoints

Fancy web portals that let you “deploy with one click” sound appealing. Until you realize that every operational change must flow through the MSP’s platform. Want to modify a VPC? You’re dependent on their UI. Need to adjust security groups? Better hope their platform supports your use case.

These orchestrators create operational lock-in: You can’t effectively operate your AWS environment without the MSP’s tooling. You’ve traded AWS complexity for MSP dependency.

3. “Simplified” Interfaces That Hide AWS Reality

Abstraction layers that promise to “make AWS easy” can create a dangerous gap between what you think you’re deploying and what’s actually running in your account. When problems arise—and they always do—you discover that your team doesn’t understand the actual AWS infrastructure because they’ve only interacted with it through the MSP’s simplified interface.

The Real-World Impact of Lock-in

Scenario 1: The Price Increase

Your MSP announces a 30% price increase. With an LZA you own and open standards, you have options: negotiate from a position of strength, bring management in-house, or transition to another MSP in months. With a proprietary platform, you’re looking at risky and arduous re-platforming work—and your MSP knows it.

Scenario 2: The Service Quality Decline

Your MSP gets acquired. The new parent company shifts focus, key engineers leave, and service quality drops. With an open approach, you can transition smoothly. With lock-in, you’re stuck enduring declining service while planning an expensive migration.

Scenario 3: The Strategic Pivot

Your company wants to build internal cloud expertise and eventually self-manage. With LZA, your team can learn standard AWS tools and practices from day one. When you’re ready to transition, you already have the skills and the code. With proprietary platforms, your team has learned the MSP’s tools, not AWS—setting your in-house capability building back by years.

Scenario 4: The Platform Limitation

Your business needs evolve, and you need to implement a complex AWS architecture that isn’t supported by your MSP’s platform. You’re now in the worst position: paying for a platform that constrains you, unable to use native AWS capabilities, and facing the choice between living with limitations or undertaking an expensive re-platforming project.

How to Evaluate Your Current or Prospective MSP

Ask these critical questions:

1. “What landing zone solution do you use?”
   • Red flag: “Our proprietary solution” or vague answers. Subscription based landing zones (yes they exist!).
   • Green flag: “your own AWS Landing Zone Accelerator” or “a per-customer AWS Control Tower with Customizations for Control Tower”
2. “What happens to our infrastructure if we terminate the contract?”
   • Red flag: Vague answers about “transition planning” or “it depends”
   • Green flag: “You keep everything—we’ll help with knowledge transfer, and you’ll have all the code and documentation”
3. “Will our team learn AWS-native tools, or primarily your platform?”
   • Red flag: “Our platform abstracts AWS complexity away”
   • Green flag: “We teach AWS best practices and native tools”

The Cloudar Philosophy: Your Cloud, Your Terms

Here’s what that means in practice:

Full LZA Implementation

Every customer gets its own AWS Landing Zone Accelerator, deployed directly into their accounts with complete source code access to the LZA configuration. Deployments happen in your account, giving you end-to-end visibility on your Landing Zone.

AWS-Native Tooling

We use CloudFormation, CDK, AWS Config, Systems Manager—tools that work with or without us. If you hire another AWS expert or build an in-house team, they’ll recognize everything immediately.

Comprehensive Documentation

You can read about every configuration option today, in the documentation published by AWS. So while we pride ourselves in sharing our knowledge, you are not dependant on us to explain what is going on

Additionally, we write customer-specific documentation  in our Confluence – from architecture decisions to operational procedures.. If you decide to leave, we can provide you with an export of that information.

Open Book Operations

You have full Read Only access to your AWS environment —we’re partners, not gatekeepers. Want to check our work? Go ahead.

Standard AWS Best Practices

We follow AWS Well-Architected Framework principles and industry-standard patterns. No “special sauce” that only we understand.

We succeed by giving you excellent service so you want to stay, not by making it painful to leave.

The Economics of Freedom

Some argue that proprietary platforms are necessary to provide better service or lower costs. We disagree.

Lower costs come from:

• Automation that scales across customers (which we use)
• Deep AWS expertise (which we have)
• Efficient processes (which we’ve refined over years)

Not from locking customers into proprietary platforms.

Better service comes from:

• Highly skilled engineers (which we continuously train)
• Customer focus (which our retention rate proves)

Not from proprietary abstraction layers.

We’ve proven that you can deliver excellent MSP services at competitive prices while keeping customers completely free. In fact, we believe customer freedom makes us better—we can’t coast on lock-in, so we must continuously earn our customers’ business.

Making the Right Choice

Before signing with any MSP, ask yourself:

• Do I understand what I’m getting into? Can you clearly explain how your infrastructure will be deployed and managed?
• What’s my exit strategy if things don’t work out? Is it measured in weeks, months, or years?
• Am I choosing this approach for the right reasons? Is convenience masking a lack of control?
• Do I retain full ownership? Of code, configurations, documentation, and knowledge?

Red Flags in MSP Sales Processes

Be wary if you encounter:

• Heavy emphasis on “simplicity” with little discussion of the underlying AWS architecture
• Vague answers about exit strategies and transition processes
• Marketing focused on proprietary platforms as the primary differentiator
• Contracts that grant the MSP exclusive rights to infrastructure code
• Lack of clarity about what you actually own vs. what you’re licensing

Conclusion: Freedom as a Feature

In the rush to cloud transformation, it’s easy to prioritize speed and convenience. And yes, a well-designed proprietary platform can deploy faster than custom LZA implementation—at least initially.

But cloud strategy isn’t measured in weeks. It’s measured in years and decades. The question isn’t “who can get me to cloud fastest?” It’s “who can help me build sustainable cloud capabilities that serve my business long-term?”

The MSP industry has a pattern: some providers build their business model around customer stickiness achieved through proprietary tooling. They create beautiful interfaces and slick demos that abstract away AWS complexity. Then, months or years later, customers realize they’ve traded AWS vendor lock-in for MSP vendor lock-in—often worse, because at least AWS is standardized.

At Cloudar, we reject this model fundamentally. We believe that customer freedom isn’t a bug to work around—it’s a feature to build for. We’re proud to be an AWS Premier MSP Partner that wins business through excellence, not lock-in.

Your cloud infrastructure is too important to be held hostage by convenient abstractions. You deserve an MSP that treats you as a partner who will grow and evolve, not a captive customer who might someday try to escape.

Choose partners who believe you should always have the keys to your own kingdom. Choose partners who succeed by being valuable, not by being necessary.

Choose freedom.

AWS, Managed Services, MSP