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Matt Saunders
Published on 11 February 2026
Business continuity in a sovereign tech era
France's ban on foreign collaboration tools is a wake-up call. True business continuity means understanding dependencies, avoiding vendor lock-in, and being ready to swap tools without disruption.
France's ban on foreign collaboration tools
Business continuity and planning can feel like pointless tasks until the government bans your core tools overnight. France's decision to phase out US software, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom, in favour of its sovereign Visio platform shows how quickly this can happen, and with data sovereignty more of an issue than ever before, we need to be ready. Thinking "we'll never have to do that" simply won't wash any more.
The French government is banning foreign collaboration tools in response to increased risks, including geopolitical tensions and jurisdictional control. In turn, this should trigger organisations to fundamentally rethink technical business continuity. The risk of a "rug pull" on commoditised services, such as public cloud and communication platforms, has shifted from theoretical to imminent. Sovereignty is no longer someone else's problem.
Entering a new era of tech sovereignty
Technical sovereignty is now entering a new era. Contemporary businesses often run critical operations on public clouds and depend on sprawling SaaS ecosystems—creating vulnerabilities they haven't adequately addressed. High performers in this area have disaster recovery procedures, but these rarely involve switching to an entirely different provider or jurisdiction.
The dependency problem compounds as businesses continue to outsource finance, HR, logistics, and other functions to specialised SaaS providers, then stitch them together with automation tools. Leaders must ruthlessly map these interdependencies: which tools are truly interoperable, which are replaceable, and which form the critical path to value delivery.
Building your contingency plan
Getting started is straightforward; map the truly critical services and understand the communication paths between them. But add a new dimension to your analysis—where are these services physically hosted, and where are their providers registered?
Geographic composition now matters as much as technical resilience. Identify single points of vendor failure and build your contingency plans, regardless of how improbable replacement might seem today. Standardised workflows, automated deployments, and codified configurations all become strategic assets. They expose business-risk dependencies and accelerate resolution. These are already disaster recovery best practices.
France proves that losing a core SaaS tool isn't a doomsday scenario when you've treated continuity as non-negotiable. The smartest organisations are already doing this work.
The importance of remaining agile
None of this means that major cloud providers will become unviable overnight, but it does skew the logic and reasoning used by operational teams to ensure they have resilient, multi-regional infrastructure setups, which may have been built around a single provider. It doesn't foresee the end of big tech providers dominating the world economy, but it does open up possibilities for locally controlled, independent alternatives, from sovereign clouds to open-source collaboration tools, given the new apparent risks around centralisation that France's government are now hedging against.
Western businesses face an uncomfortable new reality: a raft of business continuity factors to consider, many of which are not related to gaining an advantage over competitors. But as ever, agile principles remain true. Those who can adapt quickly to an evolving environment and are ready to swap out parts of their stack and business tools effectively, while simultaneously understanding the consequences, are the ones who will succeed.
How we can support you
Adaptavist's expertise across cloud, DevOps, ITSM, and work management is built on the same principle: modernise while keeping your options open. By helping organisations overhaul legacy stacks, adopt cloud and DevOps, and streamline service management, Adaptavist enables you to swap tools or platforms with far less disruption when something breaks or gets pulled.
We help you to standardise processes and data models, not products, by designing for interoperability across and between ecosystems such as Atlassian, AWS, monday.com, and more, in ways that help you achieve your goals in a visible and sensible way without overcommitting to individual vendors.