Contract and control
Ownership, termination, renewals, exit assistance, transition access, costs, and third-party dependencies.
Free editable CSV
35 exit-readiness checks
Know how you will leave before the platform becomes indispensable.
Vendor exit is not just a contract clause or a database export. It is the ability to preserve records, files, configuration, access, integrations, continuity, evidence, and operational knowledge while moving to a replacement or closing the service safely.
No email gate. Use this as an operational planning aid alongside your organization’s contract, records, privacy, legal, security, and continuity requirements.
- Negotiate before dependenceOwnership, export, assistance, deletion, and access terms are strongest before award.
- Preserve meaningData portability includes metadata, relationships, files, history, configuration, and operational context.
- Protect continuityTransition planning should reflect business impact, fallback procedures, recovery, and in-flight work.
- Close deliberatelyDecommissioning should include revocation, deletion evidence, records obligations, and named approval.
Exit as a lifecycle requirement
Design the off-ramp while you still have negotiating leverage.
The worksheet is designed for procurement, architecture review, renewal decisions, migration planning, and contract closeout. A “ready” answer should point to evidence that another reviewer can inspect.
- 01
Read the contract like an exit plan.
Identify ownership, notice, renewal, fees, transition assistance, access after notice, subcontractor dependencies, deletion, and closure evidence before relying on assumptions.
- 02
Prove portability at realistic scale.
Test records, files, metadata, identifiers, history, configuration, and export throughput using representative volume rather than a small demonstration tenant.
- 03
Inventory operational knowledge.
Capture workflows, forms, rules, templates, integrations, mappings, service accounts, custom code, configuration, runbooks, and tenant-specific deviations.
- 04
Plan coexistence and recovery.
Define system authority, identity behavior, in-flight work, reconciliation, fallback procedures, backups, rollback, and the monitoring required after cutover.
- 05
Close every obligation.
Retire accounts and integrations, preserve required records, obtain deletion evidence, reconcile financial and contractual items, and require named approval before calling the exit complete.
35 continuity and exit checks
Seven areas that should be answerable before the organization needs the answer urgently.
The downloadable worksheet includes five checks in each area, an evidence request, a suggested owner, a “ready when” condition, the risk created by a weak answer, and editable status and notes fields.
Data portability
Records, identifiers, metadata, files, relationships, history, audit evidence, formats, and production-scale export.
Configuration and documentation
Forms, workflows, rules, templates, integrations, custom artifacts, runbooks, and tenant-specific settings.
Identity and access transition
Roles, groups, entitlements, SSO, MFA, service accounts, certificates, vendor access, and legacy access.
Continuity and recovery
Business impact, RTO/RPO, backup/restore proof, fallback procedures, in-flight work, and hypercare monitoring.
Migration and coexistence
System authority, reconciliation, exceptions, rehearsals, read-only transition, and decommissioning gates.
Deletion and closure
Retention, legal holds, deletion scope, closure evidence, credential retirement, and final approval.
Portability model
A successful export should let another system reconstruct the record’s meaning.
“We can export your data” is too broad to evaluate. Break portability into independent evidence layers and test them before a termination deadline.
- 1
- Population. Export every authoritative record and explain excluded, archived, deleted, or otherwise unavailable populations.
- 2
- Meaning. Preserve field definitions, identifiers, timestamps, code values, ownership, status, provenance, and other metadata needed to interpret the record.
- 3
- Relationships. Preserve parent-child links, references, attachments, history, comments, versions, and other associations when required.
- 4
- Configuration. Export or document the workflows, forms, rules, templates, taxonomies, integrations, and tenant-specific settings that shaped system behavior.
- 5
- Scale. Demonstrate that extraction can finish within the real transition window at production volume.
Continuity boundary
Migration is a business-continuity event even when everything goes well.
Define which services matter most, what the organization can do manually, how late changes are reconciled, what must pass before cutover, and how recovery works if the target does not behave as expected.
- Prioritize functions. Use business impact and service tolerances to decide what must recover first.
- Preserve a rollback point. Prove the final backup and restore path for all system components required to recreate a consistent state.
- Reconcile in-flight work. Define how queued transactions, imports, interfaces, and user changes are captured during the transition window.
- Monitor the replacement. Use operational, integration, security, and reconciliation signals during hypercare instead of waiting for user reports.
Continuity reference
Connect exit planning to the continuity program you already have.
NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1 describes information-system contingency planning as part of organizational resilience and includes business impact analysis, recovery strategies, contingency-plan development, testing, training, exercises, and maintenance. The checklist applies those continuity ideas to the specific problem of replacing or leaving a software service; it does not replace a formal contingency plan.
Continue the decision chain
Use the exit plan to strengthen selection—not only replacement.
Ask exit questions during procurement, capture them in the software scorecard, validate security and accessibility evidence separately, and use the migration-readiness checklist when a transition becomes real. A stronger acquisition should leave the organization with more choices, not fewer.