Summary

  • From 12 January 2027, cloud providers may no longer charge a switching fee. Until then, reduced charges may cover only costs directly tied to the specific switch.
  • The EU Data Act sets a maximum two-month notice period, a 30-day transition, and at least 30 days to retrieve data afterwards. The draft ACM guide explains how providers should make that exit work.
  • In ACM’s survey of 420 business cloud users, mostly from SMEs and primarily using SaaS, 30.2% of those who had tried to switch failed. A quarter of firms trying to connect cloud services also failed.

The cloud exit has a price deadline. The hard part is the handover.

Cloud contracts have long treated departure as a customer problem. The invoice may say “termination”; the operations team sees a live database, an application that expects a particular interface, staff who know one console, and a second service that must start before the first one stops. A right to leave is cheap to print. A working exit needs a route.

The EU Data Act supplies the timetable. A contract must describe the switching process and the data and digital assets that can be exported. The notice period cannot exceed two months. The transition period is normally 30 calendar days, followed by at least 30 days for data retrieval. If 30 days is technically impossible, the provider must explain why within 14 working days and set an alternative period of no more than seven months, while maintaining continuity. The law also requires providers and customers to cooperate in good faith.

The bill changes on 12 January 2027. From that day, providers cannot impose switching charges. Before then, reduced charges remain possible, but they cannot exceed the provider’s direct costs for that particular switch. Ordinary service fees and early-termination penalties sit in a different column: Article 29 requires those to be disclosed before the contract is signed. A buyer should not let a “free exit” headline hide the line items that still govern its contract.

ACM’s new Cloud Guide turns the regulation into a checklist for providers and users. Its consultation runs through 6 November. The guide groups the work into four jobs: remove obstacles and preserve service continuity; put clear switching terms in contracts; provide technical interfaces and interoperability; and protect non-personal data from unlawful access or transfer by foreign governments. For Infrastructure-as-a-Service, the guide calls for functional equivalence after switching. A free API is useful; an application that cannot run against the destination service is a more expensive problem.

ACM’s April survey shows where the checklist meets a stubborn operating record. The questionnaire covered 420 business users, mostly working at SMEs, and primarily the SaaS layer. Some 61.7% had never switched. Among those who tried, 30.2% did not succeed. Half of firms said they already used cloud services from multiple providers; among single-provider firms, about half wanted that option. Yet one quarter of firms trying to connect services could not make the connection work. These figures describe survey respondents, not every cloud customer in Europe, and ACM says this sample and method cannot be compared directly with its 2022 study.

That gap is the market story. The law can move the fee meter to zero and require export formats, support, interfaces and a transition window. It cannot perform the customer’s dependency map. A firm still has to decide which data are portable, which applications need rewiring, who tests the replacement, and how to keep payroll, orders or public services alive while the switch happens. ACM found that about 40% of respondents had never heard of the Data Act. The rights exist; many buyers have not yet put them into a migration plan.

The draft guide’s most useful contribution may be contractual daylight. Before signing, a buyer should be able to find the maximum notice period, the transition sequence, retrieval window, exportable-data categories, known technical limits, interface documentation and charges. That turns an exit from an argument at renewal time into an operating test that can be run before the contract is signed.

The calendar is short enough to matter. The consultation ends on 6 November 2026. Provider switching charges end on 12 January 2027. Between those dates, providers can refine their contracts and systems; customers can ask for usable export instructions and test a small workload. The market will show its hand in the boring places: a complete export, a working connection, a service that stays up and a final bill that contains no invented “departure fee.”

Sources: ACM’s draft Cloud Guide consultation; ACM’s cloud-switching guidance announcement; ACM’s survey of business cloud users; EU Data Act, Regulation (EU) 2023/2854.