AI-generated visual, Microsoft Designer
After Google Cloud in January, it is the turn of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to announce, in a blog post, that it will no longer charge its customers exit fees when they consider switching to a platform competing cloud. The world number one in public cloud thus anticipates future French and European regulations.
The digital space bill, which will pass the joint committee on March 26, plans to prohibit these data transfer fees when changing provider. The original text provides that non-compliance with this ban will be punished with a fine of up to one million euros and two million euros in the event of a repeat offense.
At European level, the regulation on “fair access to data and use of data” also intends to put an end to these “ excessive data transfer costs”, “essential condition for a more competitive market “. In article 29, the text provides for a gradual reduction in its costs and their total elimination by January 2027.
Last June, the Competition Authority also criticized these exit fees or “egress fees” which “ could create a risk of customer lock-in in a growing market, by making it more difficult for cloud users to leave their first provider or use several providers at once in a multi-cloud environment.
Ending the confinement system
In fact, providers contractually undertake to ensure the portability of data to a competing cloud but the costs linked to their transfer can prove prohibitive. An exit barrier which reproduces the vendor lock-in system that companies have experienced in the world of proprietary software and in particular large ERPs such as SAP or Oracle.
These exit fees constitute one of the main obstacles to the promises of multicloud. By not putting all their eggs in the same cloud, a company reduces its dependence on market players and can switch from one cloud to another based on pricing policy, performance, innovation or quality service offered at a given time by this or that provider. You still need financial power.
In its argument, Amazon Web Services argues that more than 90% of its customers already pay no data transfer fees since 2021 and the free provision of 100 gigabytes per month, “ to use for any purpose “. The removal of exit fees should therefore primarily concern large organizations which must migrate significantly larger volumes of data when migrating to another cloud.
It remains to raise the question of software licenses
For AWS, the migration difficulties come above all from the licensing restrictions on their software that certain providers impose, making “ financially impossible for their customers to choose another cloud provider than them “. “ In some cases, it is not possible for customers to run the software on other popular cloud environments.”
The American hyperscaler refers, for this purpose, to the “10 principles of a fair software license for cloud customers”. This manifesto was written by Cigref, the French club of “major CIOs”, and by CISPE, the association representing cloud infrastructure providers in Europe.
In its January blog post, Google Cloud made the same argument criticizing “ restrictive licensing practices that lock out customers and distort competition “. Without naming suppliers, the American giant estimates that “ these and other restrictions, which have no technical basis, can impose a 300% cost increase on customers » . However, via a link, it refers to the Microsoft Azure site which compares its pricing policy to that of AWS.