Your Company Data: Where It Lives, Who Sees It, What Happens If Your Supplier Disappears
Customer records, orders, ten years of history: if your supplier closed tomorrow, how much of it would you get back? The questions to ask today, while they are still calm questions and not an emergency.
There is one question almost nobody asks their software supplier, and it is worth more than half the contract: “if you disappeared tomorrow, what would be left for me?”
It isn't a hostile question. Serious suppliers have the answer ready, because they asked it of themselves before you did. The ones who bristle usually don't have one.
It is worth asking now, in a calm moment. The alternative is asking it on the day it actually matters, and on that day the answers arrive late.
First: where the data physically lives
Your company's data sits on a server somewhere. Three questions are useful: with which hosting provider, in whose name, and in which country.
Whose name is the part that matters most. If the hosting contract is in your company's name, that data is reachable without going through anyone. If it is in the agency's name, getting to it means asking someone's permission — and the same goes for the domain and the app store accounts. It is the same argument I made in Source Code, Domain and Accounts: What Must Stay Yours.
Second: who can see it
Inside the company the question is simple: does the sales rep see margins? Does the intern see the full customer list? Decent software lets you answer “no”, and prove it.
Outside the company the question is different: how many people at the supplier have access to the production database, and is there a record of when they go in? It is normal for someone to have it — support needs it. It is not normal for everyone to have it, forever, with no trace.
Third: backups, and the question nobody asks
Everyone says they take backups. Four questions separate a real backup from a reassurance.
How often are they taken? This decides how much work you lose in the worst case: with a nightly backup, the worst case is one day of work to redo.
Where are they kept? A backup on the same server as the data protects against human error, not against a failure or an attack that takes the server. It has to live somewhere else.
Has anyone ever tried restoring them? This is the decisive one. A backup that has never been restored isn't a backup: it is a file people trust. Nasty surprises always surface on restore day.
How long are they kept? This tells you whether you can go back a week or only a day. Some mistakes — a wrong deletion, an import gone bad — are discovered days later.
Fourth: how you get it back
This is the part that matters on the day you change supplier, or the supplier closes. It isn't enough for the data to exist: it has to be able to leave, in a format somebody else can read.
Ask for something concrete: a full export, in a standard format, that you can download yourself without asking permission. If the software is well built, that function already exists. If the answer is “we'll prepare it for you when you need it”, you have just discovered you depend on them even to leave.
A good exercise: actually ask for it once, for no reason. See how long they take and what shape it arrives in. What you get on a quiet day is exactly what you will get on a bad one.
| Question | Reassuring answer | Worrying answer |
|---|---|---|
| Where is the data | “Hosting in your company's name” | “You don't need to worry about that” |
| Who accesses it | “Two engineers, with access logged” | “The whole team, always have” |
| Backups | “Nightly, off the server, last restored in March” | “Of course we take backups” |
| Export | “There's a button, let me show you” | “We'll prepare it if you need it” |
If you want to run this check and aren't sure how to word the questions, tell me what software you use: I'll send back the four questions ready to forward to your supplier, phrased so they don't read like an audit.
