With Total Information Outsourcing (TIO), corporate information systems are often hosted on server hardware located outside the company premises. Accessing, protecting, leveraging or migrating corporate data is no longer an obvious option whenever it is no longer at home.

The concept of Data Portability, introduced by [XXX Reference] and promoted by most SaaS providers is supposed to be the new panacea for interoperability and fair competition in a TIO world. However, by focusing on interoperability only, it is distracting TIO adopters from another concept: Data Completeness. Whenever data portability means that corporate data stored by TIO providers can not be completely retrieved, corporations no longer completely own their data. Instead, their data is being partly retained by a third party.

Total Data Portability (TDP) is the appropriate concept to promote fair competition and corporate ownership in a TIO world. It can be defined as providing access to all the data entered by users of a TIO service in a format which can be parsed by common off the shelf software (COTS).

Best practice in TDP should include a log files of all actions performed by users, whether they relate to data input or not, as well as a full log of data input transactions. The combination of both information is, in theory, sufficient to recreate an equivalent of the TIO service based on COTS. In addition, for true competition to happen, software capable of processing such data in a reasonable time at reasonable cost should be available at a fair cost.

Let us review two examples of TDP: open source and undisclosed.

In the case of open source TIO, it is sufficient for the TIO provider to provide input and log data in their native formats as well as a link to the source code of the applications used to provide the service. This is enough for competition to happen freely and for corporate users to retain ownership of their data.

In the case of undisclosed TIO, which means that the software used to provide the TIO service is only available to the TIO provider, data should be provided in a format (ex. XML, SQL) which is acceptable by third party applications. Ideally, the existence of a component for an ETL (ex. Talend) to migrate all data (input and logs) from the TIO provider to an equivalent COTS application, possibly open source, provides the highest protection for corporations to retain ownership of their data and to benefit from fair competition.

However, whenever undisclosed TIO provides their data in a format which does not meet TDP requirements for completeness or which requires too much effort to migrate to another environment, corporations are taking a huge risk on a key asset.