Slingr Next Gen

After developing low-code LIMS solutions and offering custom software development for more than a decade, the Slingr team has a lot of customer success stories. But we also have a lot of the inverse: stories of customers often having to spend significant resources to rectify a choice they made when building their tech stack. The most common among these is when some of our clients realized that their laboratory software vendors owned their data.

Vendor lock-in is a huge problem with cloud-based solutions and 47% of companies said that it is a concern when purchasing software solutions. One of the most common vendor lock-in tactics is to prevent users from moving their data elsewhere.

Many labs have little control over their data

From a compliance perspective, your business data may be safe if a bad actor cannot gain access to it. There are many certifications that you can look for to ensure that your vendors follow robust cybersecurity practices. But they mean little when you cannot move your data to a different platform that may better serve your needs.

Many software platforms and development teams often resort to not-so-great practices to keep their revenues consistent, costing their customers significantly. These include vendor lock-in strategies such as complex data storage policies, interoperability problems, and even contracts that prevent them from switching to different solutions.

Among these approaches, controlling client data is often the worst. This may be in the form of not developing features that let users import or transfer their own data. Or it could be actively creating legal or technical hurdles to prevent users from moving their data from their platforms.

Laboratories rarely recognize this problem until they want to shift to a new platform

This software isn’t necessarily a poor outdated solution. They are often very robust solutions that work exactly as advertised.

But at some point, these solutions don’t serve their needs. Maybe the business wants to scale up and the solution wasn’t designed for that. Or the business is expanding its operations and their lab management software doesn’t support multiple locations.

The team starts exploring new solutions and they find a solution that serves their needs. That’s when they realize that the existing solution doesn’t want you to migrate and that it is going to take a lot of resources to move their operations to the new solutions.

When the business figures out how to move its data by building a new tool, it realizes that its existing solution doesn’t want to let go of its information and won’t let it delete its own data from its servers.

Slingr has recently come across a particular vendor using these tactics to prevent customers using their lab management solution from migrating to a different platform. Slingr’s low-code LIMS solution helps labs build a tailor-made solution without the cost of traditional software development. When these customers decided to migrate to Slingr’s LIMS solution, they realized that they’re unable to get back their own data.

Here’s what happens when someone else owns your data

In the above situation, a third party has complete control over all the data from your lab. That includes your customer information, test results, and more. At best, your customers won’t be happy that their personal information is with someone else, and at worst you have a compliance nightmare.

In the case of our LIMS customers, our team was able to come up with tooling to move the data, but it took considerable resources and held back the migration process.

As in the above situation, if you provide laboratory services, the compliance problems alone can put a halt to your business operations. If you’re in the cannabis industry or another field where compliance requirements change rapidly, this may even create a data security minefield.

The situation also makes it difficult to switch to a new solution. With enough resources, you may be able to build tools to copy all of your data to a different solution. Or you may end up using the old solution despite lacking the capabilities you need and holding your business back.

Don’t sign over your data. Even if they promise the world

Before using a solution — even if you’re at the very early stages of your business — go through their data storage policy. Sometimes great features, good pricing, and the rush to get started may demand that you make some compromises.

But once your business is up and running and you want to scale your operations or expand it to new fields, you may realize you need a different solution. So it's always better to choose solutions that don’t create vendor lock-in and have sketchy data storage policies.

It’s not enough that you own the data

Regulations have made it difficult for software vendors to hold your data as ransom. Many countries (particularly in the EU) have strict data storage policies which state that the user owns the data and has the right to be forgotten.

But that is not going to stop sketchy vendors from coming up with ingenious ways to stop you from switching to a new solution.

Before choosing an enterprise software, make sure that:

You check their data storage policies.
Their business continuity plans are robust to support your business needs.
They offer the tools to migrate the data from their platform.
Their cybersecurity strategies meet your needs.

Looking for a new LIMS solution?

Slingr offers a highly flexible low-code laboratory information management system. The solution simplifies compliance and is designed for labs that doesn’t want an off-the-shelf solution and at the same time doesn’t want to spend a lot of resources on a custom solution.

And we don’t control your data.

‍Reach out to us to learn more about Slingr and our low-code platform.