By Jaap van Duijvenbode
Co-Founder and VP Product Strategy & Customer Experience
Summary: From January 2027, the EU Data Act prohibits cloud switching charges, including data egress charges incurred as part of the switching process.
That removes the most visible barrier to moving large data estates, and it shifts the real question from "what does it cost to leave?" to "how should we retain, govern and use this information for the long term?"
The deadline
The EU Data Act has applied since September 2025, including its rules on switching between data processing services. During a transition period, providers may charge only the direct costs of switching. From January 12th, 2027, switching charges, including egress fees for data leaving as part of a switch, are prohibited for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS alike.
For organizations holding hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of long-term data, exit cost has quietly shaped architecture decisions for a decade. Once large volumes of data accumulated on a platform, the cost of moving it became another reason to leave it there.
The fee was never the only lock-in
Removing a charge does not make data portable. Four other barriers remain:
- Proprietary formats that must be converted before data is usable elsewhere.
- Dependencies on provider-specific APIs and managed services.
- Identity and permission models tied to one platform, which do not travel with the data.
- Contracts with long notice periods or auto-renewal clauses that pre-date the new rules.
- Retain: which information must be kept, for how long, and under which jurisdiction?
- Access: can people find it when they need it, without a retrieval request that takes days?
- Govern: do permissions, retention rules and audit trails survive a move, or are they lost with the old platform?
- Activate: can the information serve as trusted context for AI assistants and agents, with its access controls intact?
Note also that the Data Act addresses switching, not everyday operational traffic. Serving data to users from the cloud still carries normal transfer costs.
From portability to long-term strategy
The more useful question is not whether to move, but what long-term enterprise data should look like once moving it becomes practical. Most organizations keep decades of information for legal, regulatory and operational reasons. Very little of it is accessible to the people or AI systems that could use it.
The switching deadline is a natural moment to reassess that estate as a whole:
An organization that answers these questions may still choose to stay where it is. The difference is that the choice will be deliberate rather than dictated by an exit bill.
What to settle before January
Review contracts for renewal dates and switching clauses before they roll past the deadline. Ask your providers what can be exported, in which formats, and within what timeframe. And inventory the permissions and metadata attached to your data today, because that context is often among the hardest things to move, and essential to preserving the meaning, governance and usability of the information.
Want to review your long-term data strategy ahead of the deadline? Talk to our specialists.
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