Commercial
Vendor lock-in
The cost of leaving a supplier, whether or not anyone intended it.
Definition
The situation where switching providers is expensive enough to be impractical, because knowledge, tooling, credentials or proprietary components sit with the incumbent. It develops through drift far more often than through deliberate design.
Why it matters
You cannot negotiate well with a supplier you cannot leave, and the leverage erodes silently. The practical defences are cheap and boring: your own repositories and cloud accounts, documentation produced continuously rather than at the end, and at least one person on your side who can explain the system.
Related
Read next
Knowledge transfer
Deliberately moving what one person knows into the team.
Read the definition ›Escrow (source code)
Depositing code with a third party so you can get it if the provider disappears.
Read the definition ›Handover
Transferring work and the reasoning behind it.
Read the definition ›Runbook
Step-by-step instructions for operating and fixing a system.
Read the definition ›Next step
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