Private infrastructure should leave you free to move

A firm that brings its systems in-house often does so to regain control. Control can slip away again in quieter ways: an administrator account only the supplier holds, data in a format only one product reads, a model whose licence nobody filed, a build that lives in one engineer’s memory. Private infrastructure earns its name when the firm can change supplier, or take the work in-house, without starting over.

This article reflects public law and documentation available in early September 2026. The legal points are general information, not legal advice.

Ownership is a set of controls

Ownership of a system can be tested with a few questions:

• Who holds the top-level administrator credentials? The firm should hold them, with a sealed break-glass copy under its own custody. A supplier works through named accounts the firm can disable.
• Who holds the encryption keys? Keys held only by a supplier make the firm’s data the supplier’s to open.
• Where is the documentation? Network diagrams, configuration, restore procedures and the model register belong to the firm, stored where the firm can reach them without the supplier.
• Who can rebuild it? If only one person can, the firm owns hardware, not a system.

None of this implies distrust. It keeps an ordinary change of supplier from becoming an emergency.

Data in formats others can read

Exit depends on formats. Documents stay in the formats the firm already uses. Structured data should export in documented, widely supported forms. PostgreSQL’s pg_dump documentation (version 17), for example, describes plain-text SQL dumps that can rebuild a database on other machines and architectures, and, with some changes, on other SQL products. Its archive formats work with pg_restore and are designed to be portable across architectures. Choosing components with export paths like these is an exit decision made at the start.

An export that has never been restored is a hope. The same restore test used for recovery, run on independent hardware from the firm’s own copies, shows whether exit would work.

What moves in an AI system

A private AI system adds items that ordinary IT exit plans miss.

Source documents and permissions move as they are. They are the firm’s records.

The index and embeddings are tied to the embedding model that produced them. Vectors from one model are not comparable with vectors from another. The durable asset is the source text, its chunking rules and its metadata. With those, a new supplier can re-index with any model. Moving the vectors alone rarely helps.

Model files move with their hashes, version and licence. Format matters for safety as well as portability. Hugging Face’s pickle security documentation explains that loading pickle-based files can execute arbitrary code. Weights in a data-only format are safer to hand from one party to another.

Licences move with obligations. Open-weight models carry terms. The Llama 3.3 Community License, for example, attaches conditions to redistribution and incorporates an acceptable use policy. A register of each model’s source, version, hash and licence lets a new supplier take over without guessing. Licence questions for a specific use belong with counsel.

Evaluation records move too. The question set and past results let the next team confirm the system behaves as before.

Offline copies and escrow

CISA’s #StopRansomware Guide recommends golden images of critical systems, configuration kept as code with offline copies, and source code or executables stored with offline backups, together with escrow and licence agreements. It gives the reason: rebuilding from images can fail on different hardware, and separate access to the software helps. The advice was written for ransomware recovery. It serves exit just as well. The material a firm needs to rebuild after an attack is the material a new supplier needs to take over.

What the contract should say

European law has started to set expectations for cloud exit. The EU Data Act, applicable from 12 September 2025, requires providers of data processing services to set out switching rights in a written contract. Its terms include a maximum notice period of two months to start switching, a transitional period of up to 30 calendar days, extendable to at most seven months where the provider justifies that 30 days is technically unfeasible, and a data retrieval period of at least 30 days. From 12 January 2027, providers may not charge switching fees. Until then, reduced charges may not exceed the provider’s direct costs. The regulation covers switching to another provider or to on-premises infrastructure.

Monaco is not a member of the European Union, and whether the Data Act reaches a given arrangement is a question for counsel. Its provisions still make a useful checklist for any supplier contract: notice, assistance during the move, the scope of exportable data and metadata, security during transfer, and confirmed deletion at the end.

Individuals have their own right. Monaco’s Loi n° 1.565, Article 18, gives a data subject the right to receive personal data they provided in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, where processing rests on consent or contract and is automated. A system built on open formats makes that request easier to meet.

Rehearse the handover

An exit plan becomes real when someone other than its author follows it. A rehearsal takes the firm’s own copies, its documentation and its credentials, and rebuilds a working system on separate hardware without the original supplier’s help. Gaps appear fast: an undocumented setting, a key in the wrong place, a licence file missing. Each gap closed now is one less problem on the day a move is needed.

A supplier who helps a client leave is still a supplier worth hiring. To plan a private system you remain free to move, write to contact@desgarde.com.