How sovereign is the storage of your company’s most important intellectual property, really? Of course, a considerable share of it sits in the PLM/ALM solution — but where exactly, and under whose influence is the data held?
The last post looked at the jurisdiction of the PLM/ALM vendor as the structural framework. Today I’m looking at the influence of the chosen operating model. Typical operating models are:
Vendor SaaS / public cloud
The vendor runs the solution itself (e.g. Windchill+ or Teamcenter X), often on top of a hyperscaler. Updates, security fixes and administration models are controlled centrally. Dependency is greatest here — the jurisdiction of the vendor and, where applicable, of the cloud provider used has a direct impact.
On-premise
Installation and operation in your own data center, so the infrastructure is under your own control. The vendor merely supplies software, patches and releases. Dependencies are reduced as a result — and independence is maximized, with caveats (see below).
Managed hosting / private cloud
Similar to on-prem, but operated by a service provider, often with an additional chain of subcontractors. More jurisdictions come into play — quite manageable, depending on who is responsible for infrastructure and operations.
On-prem is not automatically a safe haven
Please don’t forget support. Even when operation is on-prem or in a private cloud, questions arise:
- Who is allowed administrative access?
- From which country is support delivered?
- Who deploys patches and releases?
- Are patches and releases checked for “unwanted payloads”?
On-prem / private cloud is therefore not automatically the “safe haven”. What matters is: who operates, who maintains, who checks, who has access — and under which legal framework?
It is not the operating model itself that makes a PLM/ALM solution sovereign, but the answers to four questions: who operates it, who maintains it, who checks the patches, and who has access in an emergency? On-prem reduces dependencies, but on its own does not guarantee sovereignty.
