We have seen by now that the White House has no problem cutting the International Criminal Court off from Office 365.
How big is your problem if your company (or country) suffers the same fate? Or your webshop? And what if your competitor can keep working while you can’t? How big is your problem if your trade secrets, such as designs and ongoing contract negotiations, end up with your American competitor?
If you conclude that you cannot accept this risk, you will need to take action at a strategic level. The decision to move everything to the cloud seemed like a logical strategic choice a few years ago, taking back control of the digital side of your business is equally logical now. Your head of IT won’t just pick this up on the side alongside all the other tasks you’ve already given them. Practically every company is locked into AWS/Azure/GCP-specific solutions. Migrating away will cost money and time, costs that weren’t included in the budget.
At a strategic level, you are talking about your product offering, operations, profit margin, and business continuity. Your cloud situation impacts the last two. Your way out is to focus on the first two.
Nobody is eager to spend a lot of money to get the same thing just for the warm feeling of being in control yourself, so you need to fold it into new developments. The natural evolution of your products and operations already requires constant updates to your (cloud) technical infrastructure. Your best option will be to decide that every new IT development should move you further away from the American tech trap.
Sometimes that will mean a new website. Other times it will be about your office suite and securing your email. Your team will need to get up to speed with different technologies. However, you’ll find that your ongoing costs will ultimately go down, Microsoft turns out to be quite expensive in practice and actually costs your organisation a fair amount of time as well.
My tip: build a strategic roadmap of the development of your company’s offering and the operations needed to deliver it, where business continuity (and therefore cloud sovereignty) is factored into the planning.
For that, you need expertise at the table that can tell you what the impact of the move toward cloud sovereignty is at each step, in project costs, in lead time, and then in ongoing costs. If you don’t have that close at hand, you can always give me a call!
