Imagine a company managing its sales, inventory, and accounts through a single digital platform. Over time, customer data, payment systems, warehouses, and delivery systems connect to it, and employees become accustomed to its tools. The company's procedures are built around its features, making it more efficient than ever before. However, if the platform raises its prices or stops a critical service, the company may find that switching to an alternative is not just a new purchasing decision but a costly project requiring data transfer, application modifications, employee training, system testing, and risking business disruptions.
This scenario is not hypothetical. In November 2023, Broadcom acquired a prominent virtualization software company that many data centers and institutions rely on. Shortly after, the company announced it would stop selling new perpetual licenses and transition to a subscription model, reorganizing its products into a limited number of key offerings. Some customers protested due to rising renewal costs, with reports indicating increases of around 300% in some cases. A Gartner study published in October 2025 noted that renewal costs for some clients ranged between three and four times the last price paid.
The case of AT&T highlights the challenge. The company operates around 75,000 virtual machines on approximately 8,600 servers. In a setup of this size, finding a cheaper product is not enough; the transition requires planning, testing, and technical resources, and it may carry operational risks that do not appear in price comparisons alone. The question is how the choice turns into a dependence that is hard to change. In engineering, a system is evaluated not just by its performance under ideal conditions but also by its ability to continue when circumstances change.
A study published by the Boston Consulting Group in November 2025, which included 500 IT decision-makers from North America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, found that 62% of participants were concerned about being locked into digital platforms, while 79% said the value of platforms justified the cost, and 70% reported actively looking for alternatives. These results do not mean that platforms are not valuable but reveal that benefiting from them and worrying about dependence can coexist.
The solution is not necessarily to use multiple vendors for every service but to identify acceptable levels of dependence that could become weaknesses threatening business continuity. It is essential to distinguish between choosing to stay with a service because it provides real value and being forced to stay because the cost of leaving has become prohibitive. The former is a healthy economic relationship, while the latter limits negotiation and decision-making freedom.
The right to exit starts before signing a contract. It is crucial to know where data is stored, in what formats, which applications depend on it, and which services cannot be run without a specific vendor. A "dependency map" clarifies the connections that may make a transition difficult. Using documented data formats and standard interfaces can help systems exchange information without rebuilding everything when changing vendors.
Companies should approach digital exit as they do business continuity and disaster recovery plans. They should periodically choose a critical service and test their ability to transfer data and run part of their operations in an alternative environment on a limited scale. This exercise reveals real obstacles before a crisis occurs, allowing them to assess transition time, cost, disabled functions, and work required for reconstruction.
Key points
- Companies must be aware of the potential for vendor lock-in when adopting digital platforms and take proactive steps to mitigate this risk.
- A "dependency map" can help companies understand their connections to digital platforms and plan for potential transitions.
- Regular exercises in digital exit can help companies prepare for potential vendor changes and minimize disruptions.
