Some large customers that adopted hybrid cloud models to avoid the lock-in of outsourcing arrangements may find themselves trapped again if they don’t take control of the relationship with cloud providers, an EMC executive said last week at the VMworld conference in San Francisco.

Brokering hybrid cloud without contestability between providers carries risks, said Ted Newman, senior director of cloud and IT transformation at the storage giant and VMware parent.

“If you’re not able to define why, from a business and technology perspective, you’re using a certain service provider to host a workload, then, my opinion, you’re trapped,” Newman said in an interview on theCUBE at VMworld. “You made the decision for a wrong reason,”

From CPUs and virtual memory to security policy and cost profile, everything associated with the workload must be sufficiently defined and matched up with an internal or external service provider, Newman said. Don’t make cloud decisions for the sake of convenience.

In order to leverage multiple cloud providers with contestability throughout, customers need to have the technology in place to move workloads fluidly between on-premise and off-premise environments, Newman recommended, noting that VMware’s NSX can be used for this process. Customers must also be able to enforce policies the same way both on- and off-premise. That’s the purpose of VMware’s vRealize Suite. The goal is to run applications where it makes business sense without regard to platform.

Amazon’s early value proposition of requiring only “a credit card and couple of clicks” is no longer a differentiator, he said. “Now, we’re in a position where you can still get the agility, but make the choice based on the features and functions.”

Watch the interview below (16:03)