The EU Data Act has moved from negotiation to application, and one of its most concrete effects is about the cloud: the right to switch providers without unreasonable barriers. For anyone buying infrastructure, it’s one of the most important regulatory changes in years.
Switching becomes a right
At the core, a cloud provider may not lock you in through technical or economic barriers. You must be able to move data and applications to another provider within a reasonable time, switching charges are phased out, and the provider must supply the information and interfaces needed for the export to work.
In practice, “vendor lock-in” goes from a business strategy to a compliance problem. Providers who built retention on it being hard to leave now have an issue.
Portability bolted on afterwards always feels like an escape hatch. Portability built in feels like a given.
— from Kepler’s trust model
What to demand from a provider
- Can the whole account be exported as code, not just raw data?
- Is the control plane built on open standards so another provider can receive it?
- Are there fees or technical thresholds that make exit expensive in practice?
Built in, not bolted on
Kepler runs on OpenStack and open standards, and we built “export everything as code” from day one. You can generate your whole account structure as Terraform and take it anywhere. The Data Act makes it a requirement — we made it a design principle before the law arrived.