Rethinking Digital Ownership in an Age of Platform Dependence

Barry Fisher argues that digital sovereignty starts not with nostalgia, but with knowing what is worth owning.

Staff Reporter

Barry Fisher, founder and CEO of Pivale, draws a parallel between fragile physical supply chains and the quiet dependencies embedded in modern digital infrastructure. In a recent blog post, he argues that outsourced convenience often masks critical risks, from SaaS lock-in to unclear ownership of data and process.

Fisher critiques the unchecked expansion of third-party services, including CRM tools, cloud platforms, and AI layers, that gradually shift control away from the organisation. When failure happens upstream, many teams discover how tightly they’ve coupled their operations to vendors they can’t influence.

The answer isn’t to return to in-house servers, he notes, but to pursue digital sovereignty: a practical audit of which systems are worth owning and how to avoid being cornered by vendor decisions. Here, open-source software like Drupal offers a structural advantage. The code is inspectable, the data models are yours, and platform evolution can align with internal strategy.

Fisher also highlights infrastructure choices, advocating for multicloud PaaS models that avoid hardwiring to any single hyperscaler. Tools like Upsun make exit routes technically viable—a critical safeguard as platform terms, risks, or priorities shift.

His larger argument is a call for intentionality. Control is not free. It must be designed, owned, and maintained. Teams must distinguish between convenience and strategic value. The real cost of platform over-reliance, Fisher suggests, is not always money: it is the slow erosion of agency.

Reference: Who really owns your digital platforms? by Barry Fisher, Pivale (27 January 2026)

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