Cloud Exit Strategy: Reality or Myth?

Regulators, especially in the financial sector (DORA in Europe), are increasingly demanding that organizations have a Cloud Exit Strategy. But is it really possible to move a complex, multi-service application from one provider to another without years of effort?

Why an Exit Strategy?

• Vendor Lock-in: Reducing the risk of sudden price increases or service degradation.
• Regulatory Compliance: Proving that your business is resilient even if your primary cloud provider fails.
• Negotiating Leverage: You have more power in contract negotiations if you could leave.

Portability vs. Innovation

The trap is trying to build everything to be 100% portable. If you only use "lowest common denominator" services (like basic VMs), you miss out on the value of the cloud (Serverless, Managed DBs, AI).

Pragmatic Portability

1. Kubernetes for Compute: Provides a consistent abstraction layer for containers across all clouds.
2. Infrastructure as Code: Keep your environment definitions in Terraform or Pulumi to recreate them quickly.
3. Data Portability: Use managed databases with standard engines (PostgreSQL, MySQL) rather than proprietary ones.
4. Abstracting Cloud Services: Use internal platform abstractions to hide provider-specific APIs from application code.

What a credible exit plan includes

Regulators rarely expect a one-click migration. They expect evidence that you understand your dependency chain.

• An inventory of critical services (compute, storage, IAM, networking, observability).
• A data plan (export formats, recovery time, and where backups live).
• A target architecture for a “Plan B” environment (another cloud, on-prem, or managed provider).
• Runbooks and owners (who does what, in what order).

Test it like a disaster recovery exercise

The easiest way to make an exit strategy real is to run small, controlled drills:

1. Rebuild a non-production environment from IaC.
2. Restore data from backups into a neutral format (e.g., PostgreSQL dump).
3. Prove you can cut over a single service (or a read-only workload) with clear success criteria.

Common pitfalls

• Focusing only on compute: data, IAM, and networking are usually the hard parts.
• No dependency mapping: you can’t migrate what you can’t describe.
• Over-optimizing for portability: you may lose the benefits that justified cloud adoption.

Conclusion

A Cloud Exit Strategy shouldn't mean you're ready to leave tomorrow. It means you understand your dependencies, have a plan for your data, and have made conscious choices about where to accept lock-in for the sake of speed.