Cloud exit strategy
A cloud exit strategy is a documented plan for moving workloads, data, and configurations off a cloud provider — or between providers — without prolonged downtime, data loss, or loss of negotiating position. It covers data portability, technical dependencies, contractual notice periods, and a tested timeline, and is built before it's needed, not during a crisis.
In practice, a cloud exit strategy is an inventory plus a plan. The inventory lists what actually depends on the current provider: compute images, managed database formats, DNS records, firewall and network configuration, IAM policies, and any provider-specific APIs or managed services your application calls directly. The plan covers how each of those gets extracted or rebuilt elsewhere — what format data exports in, how long a full migration realistically takes, what the contract's notice period and early-termination terms are, and who on the team can execute it. Organizations that treat this as a checkbox usually discover the gap during an actual crisis: a price increase, an outage with no committed recovery time, or a provider discontinuing a service a production system depends on. A real exit strategy is tested before any of that happens, not assembled during it.
Lock-in rarely comes from a signed contract — it comes from architecture. Proprietary managed services (a provider's own database engine, message queue, or serverless runtime) are the hardest to leave because rebuilding on another platform means rewriting application code, not just moving data. Egress fees add a direct cost to leaving. And infrastructure that was provisioned by hand, through a provider's own console, is often undocumented anywhere except that console — nobody can list what exists, let alone move it. None of this means avoiding provider-specific features entirely; it means knowing, in writing, which parts of the stack are portable, which aren't, and what it would cost and take to change that.
Why it matters even if you never leave
Most organizations that build an exit strategy never execute it — and that's the point. A documented, tested ability to leave is negotiating leverage: a vendor that knows switching is realistic has less room to raise prices, degrade support, or push unfavorable contract terms at renewal. It's also risk management against events outside your control — a regional outage, a provider exiting a market, an acquisition that changes a product's roadmap, or a change in terms of service. And it's increasingly a regulatory expectation, not a nice-to-have: EU rules like NIS2 require organizations to manage risk in their ICT supply chain, and sector-specific rules such as DORA explicitly ask regulated entities to document exit plans for critical third-party providers. Procurement and security reviews ask for one before a deal closes, not after.
How Sencai keeps that option open
Sencai connects to your existing cloud accounts under a BYOC model: nothing migrates into Sencai, and the account, contract, and billing stay with you. Credentials are encrypted at rest, and you can revoke Sencai's access at the provider at any time. The moment an account connects, Sencai inventories what's already running — instances, networks, storage, DNS — resource by resource, with no forced adoption; the same discovery works across all 11 providers Sencai supports. That gives you a standing, current picture of what you're actually dependent on, instead of one assembled under deadline. The same control plane works whether that infrastructure stays with the provider you chose or moves to another one Sencai supports.
See how inventory and provisioning works →