Switching Between Cloud Providers

Policy Efforts to Avoid Vendor Lock-In in Cloud Computing

Study on behalf of the European Commission DG Connect

The main objective of this study was to gather evidence on practices relating to switching of cloud service providers, with a specific focus on the barriers potentially preventing data portability and/or application portability, which may reduce users’ choices, and the policy measures needed to overcome these barriers. The study provided practical and evidence-based recommendations supporting policy making aimed at facilitating the switching of cloud service providers by business and private users. It:

• Collected evidence on the issues related to portability when switching cloud service providers
• Provided empirical findings about the main causes of these issues and their suggested countermeasures, identifying good practices
• Organised the interaction with the community of cloud stakeholders
• Assessed measures to enable cloud service customers to ensure portability and enable providers to offer portability, including extending the new data portability right created by the GDPR to non-personal data and to all categories of users
• Identified, analysed and assessed the potential competitiveness, innovation and economic impacts on the development of the cloud market of the introduction of the mandatory right to data portability and mandatory right to application portability
• Collected feedback through a stakeholder workshop to validate the study’s conclusions
• Drew up conclusions and provided practical guidance on the best ways to enable portability in the cloud services market
• Offered recommendations on regulatory and non-regulatory measures to avoid cloud user lock-in and enable the balanced development of the cloud computing market in Europe