An exit plan requirement must be credible and tested. What does that mean for how you build?

What is being tested

Whether you can translate a regulatory obligation into concrete technology decisions.

What "credible and tested" rules out

"We could rewrite it" is not a plan. If leaving a provider would take eighteen months and a full rebuild, the exit plan does not exist regardless of what the document says.

Credible means: a specific sequence, a realistic timeframe, identified alternatives, and — the part usually missing — evidence that a meaningful part of it has been exercised.

What it means for how you build

1. Provider-specific managed services in a critical path require justification. Not prohibition — justification, weighed against the exit obligation. A proprietary serverless platform holding core business logic is far harder to leave than a container running a standard runtime.

2. Prefer managed versions of open interfaces. A managed PostgreSQL or a managed Kafka can be replaced by another provider's equivalent, or self-hosted, with a migration rather than a rewrite. A proprietary equivalent cannot.

This is the single most consequential principle, and it costs little at adoption time.

3. Keep business logic out of provider configuration. Rules encoded in a provider's workflow engine or rules service cannot be migrated and must be rebuilt from scratch — which is where these migrations actually fail.

4. Verify data portability. Not "they say there is an export" — test it, at volume, and confirm the output is complete and usable.

5. Make the critical path portable, not the whole estate. Full portability everywhere is expensive and usually unnecessary. Identify what is material, make that portable, and accept lock-in where the consequence is small.

6. Exercise part of the plan. Restore a backup to a different provider. Run a component elsewhere for a period. Evidence beats assertion, and it also finds the parts of the plan that do not work.

The commercial dimension

Exit cost is a negotiating position. A provider prices renewals knowing what leaving would cost you. Portability is not only regulatory compliance and engineering insurance — it is leverage, and it must exist before the renewal rather than after.

The related obligation

Concentration risk, both yours and the sector's, which is what drives multi-provider requirements in regulated sectors — a resilience argument rather than a commercial one.