It’s Time for Business Continuity and Exit Plans

These plans must be there for your business to continue in a crisis. When the services you utilize stop running or otherwise get untrustworthy. Ideally, your exit plans should allow you to move all your activities from where you are now. While Disaster Recovery plans are nice, they restore you to where you came from. You need to consider how to pull the plug in a crisis and walk away.

So recently my brother had water damage in their house. The business continuity was to move into their summer cottage. Recovery is the builders reconstructing the house. The exit plans - the plan for moving somewhere else. Just to paint a simple picture.

With the current 2025 US political landscape, I'm sure many EU business leaders are reconsidering the trustworthiness and integrity of the US public cloud and similar IT services. The US-EU safeguards that should protect citizen data and financial data can currently be disregarded without consequence from the US politicians and data brokers.

Just as one example. Many primary schools here hand Chromebooks out to 12-year-olds - and have the infrastructure to support it. Partly after COVID, partly due to Denmark being among one of the most digital nations in the world. This means that location data, usage data and all other kinds of data of minors and minority groups are sent unfiltered to Google. Any US person in power can request this data and use it against the persons. Until now, special "gentleman agreements" have been in place, but they can simply be discarded by whoever is in charge in the US and segregation of duties is laughed upon all the way to the bank.

This is a business problem too

That's where we are at. For reasons. Decisions for data at US services were made. Projects and programs to "journey to the cloud" were completed. And we ended up where key national financial infrastructure is hosted at US cloud providers. Subject to US political winds and fancy.

It's only 5-6 years back I experienced big international companies moving their operations out of China due to growing political concerns, data leaks and espionage. It took migrating 500 IT positions from China to the Philippines. It's a similar exercise - and I know big European-based companies have the will to do investments like this. The only blocker is that the US administration used to be a friend. A business companion. A comrade in arms. A trustworthy ally.

Today is the time for European business leaders to refocus on business Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. Part of that is to consider:

• Is my business data leaked to unwanted areas?
• Do my systems and data have controls so that no person can export it
• What if my IT vendors suddenly stop delivering
• How easy is it to exit a current vendor/location and move elsewhere

As with Backup and recovery exercises the key is to set goals on the time to technically recover and how much data loss can be accepted. It could be that you accept to exit to another cloud provider in 3 months. In case of PR & posting platforms being unavailable or untrustworthy due to enshittification, can you cut the loss and build new content elsewhere?

The first step is to have the discussion, set the business tolerance and risk appetite and then develop the solutions to support it. Test the procedures recurringly to see that you can in fact connect on Signal should Microsoft Teams be off the planet.

Are there redundancies in place or are they all multiple single points of failure?

This is a home and personal issue too

What are your fallback options in times of disaster or crisis? How much of your personality and way of living is hooked into Metas solutions? How portable are all your personal files in Google Drive really? Are your passwords and email addresses too frequently on the HaveIBeenPwnd breach lists? Are you giving away your writing, images and content away for AI training? When is enough tracking enough? If you have locked yourself in (the famous vendor lock - go for Facebook too), find a way out. Try a way out - set up shop where you are in control.

It's not a matter of when you need this - but how prepared you want to be. Both at home and for the business.