Leaving

Ask how you leave before you arrive. Leverage exists only before signature: a vendor competing for your business answers questions about export, notice and format; the same vendor holding your data and an auto-renewing contract has no reason to.

Regulation (EU) 2023/2854, the Data Act, applies from 12 September 2025 and targets vendor lock-in directly — a two-month notice period including for fixed-term contracts, a switching right under Article 25, free data export, and a prohibition on technical and contractual obstacles. For a separate operational reference from Monitask, see this guide.

It stacks with GDPR Article 20, which is an individual right over personal data and reaches fields a bulk export misses.

What neither touches: configuration, integrations and people. The work you did inside the tool does not come out with the export and is frequently worth more than the records, because records accumulate while configuration encodes decisions that were argued about and revised.

For broader context, see European Commission.

Exports routinely omit attachments, comments, audit history, object relationships and derived data. The question that produces a pause is not whether a vendor exports but what is not included, and it costs one sentence to ask.

And when a vendor shuts down, the preparation that makes it survivable is a quarterly export you already have — an hour that turns an emergency into a migration.

The section also covers export formats and what each preserves, integrations as the second lock and the invisible automations nobody listed, running a migration where the two cost decisions are how much history moves and how faithfully configuration is reproduced, and the nine steps of leaving well before access ends.

• Configuration Is Not Data

  The work you did inside the tool does not come out with the export, and it is frequently worth more than the records.

• The EU Data Act

  Since September 2025 leaving a cloud service in the EU is a right rather than a negotiation. What changed and what to ask for.

• Export Formats

  An export is only useful if something else can read it. Four formats, what each preserves, and the test to run before signing.

• The Second Lock

  Every connection to another system is value on the way in and a rebuild on the way out. How to keep the count honest.

• Leaving Well

  The last two weeks with a vendor decide what you walk out with. Nine things to do, in order, before access ends.

• Running a Migration

  Moving the data is the small half. Six phases, the two decisions that determine cost, and what to leave behind.

• Portability Under GDPR

  Article 20 is an individual right that reaches data a vendor's export misses. What it covers, who can use it, and its limits.

• When a Vendor Shuts Down

  Acquisition, sunset or insolvency, each with a different timeline and a different route to your data. What to do in week one.

• What You Cannot Export

  The question that produces a pause. Seven things exports routinely omit, and which of them you would actually miss.

• Exit Comes First

  Asking how you leave before you arrive changes what you notice, what you negotiate, and which vendors bother to answer.