Cloud vendor lock-in and egress fees

Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 of December 13, 2023, the Data Act, bans all switching charges for data processing services from January 12, 2027. Until then, it allows them only at the provider's actual cost. Google Cloud moved first, waiving egress fees in January 2024 for customers leaving its platform, and Amazon Web Services followed in March. Vendor lock-in is the set of costs that make leaving a cloud provider more expensive than staying dependent on it: rewriting applications built on proprietary interfaces, losing accumulated skills, multi-year discounted commitments. The heaviest are egress fees, the per-gigabyte charges levied when data leaves the platform although bringing it in was free. The asymmetry is deliberate and its economics are well understood, dependence growing mechanically with the volume of data accumulated. The risk consequence is direct: a locked-in company cannot execute its multi-provider continuity plan, however well that document reads, and an unexecutable plan is worth no more than no plan. The law has stepped in: the European Data Act requires the phase-out of switching charges and sets migration timeframes. A commercial matter thus becomes an obligation. An underwriter can therefore now ask, on documentary evidence, whether the advertised exit path is contractually executable.