As of October 2026, the European Commission is reported to be preparing to name Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in November. Bloomberg’s sources describe the decision as a draft whose timing could slip, and the Commission has not publicly set a date.
What would gatekeeper status change for AWS and Azure customers?
Once designated, each company would have six months to bring its cloud services in line with the DMA, which points to around May 2027 if the decision arrives in November as reported. The rules stop gatekeepers favouring their own products, require them to work with rival services and require customers to be able to move their data, which would make it easier to switch provider or use more than one. Fines can reach 10% of global sales, rising to 20% for repeat breaches, and the finer details will become clear once the Commission publishes its decision.
Designation would not stop anyone using either service, and your existing environment stays as it is on designation day, including your contracts, the services your applications use and the skills your team has built around them. This is why the design of your environment remains the main influence on how easy it is to move later. The DMA also sits alongside the EU Data Act, which already gives cloud customers switching rights and ends switching charges on 12 January 2027. Both companies have pushed back: AWS argues that the Data Act already regulates cloud and that extra DMA rules could deter investment in Europe, while Microsoft has said Europe’s cloud sector is innovative and highly competitive.
What does this mean for UK businesses?
The DMA is EU law, so it would not directly change the rules for UK customers. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has taken a different approach. Its 2025 market investigation found that AWS and Microsoft each hold up to 40% of UK customer spend, and identified three issues limiting choice: egress fees, barriers to running multiple clouds and software licensing. It also recorded that UK customers value the innovation both providers offer. In March 2026, the CMA chose to continue working with both providers and review progress after six months, keeping formal action open.
In the meantime, AWS and Microsoft have committed to removing egress fees for UK customers who switch for at least 180 days, charging at cost for multi-cloud data transfers, launching direct datacentre connections and extending EU interoperability standards to the UK. They said they would put the egress commitments on a contractual footing, with Microsoft amending contracts and AWS publishing an addendum that applies automatically. The commitments are voluntary, and the CMA has said their effectiveness remains to be seen. Licensing is a separate question: the CMA did not identify material progress on Microsoft’s software licensing, and in May 2026 it opened a strategic market status investigation into Microsoft’s business software ecosystem, with a current deadline of 13 February 2027.
It is worth checking whether your contract reflects these commitments, what counts as switching, and which of your services rely on proprietary features or licensing priced differently across platforms.
Where does cloud lock-in come from?
Lock-in rarely comes from a single clause or feature. It builds up through choices made while an environment is designed, contracted and run, and each choice usually has a sound reason behind it. The aim is to know where your dependencies sit and accept them knowingly, because any platform creates some dependence once you build on it, including a managed hosting provider’s. Five sources matter most:
- Contracts and licensing: notice periods, minimum terms, spend commitments and how software licences are priced on different platforms.
- Data volume and egress: the more data you hold, the longer a transfer takes, and fees have historically added to the cost.
- Proprietary services and APIs: managed databases and serverless functions save effort, but code written for them has to be adapted to run elsewhere.
- Identity and tooling: access policies, monitoring and deployment pipelines are often built around one platform and can take the longest to rebuild.
- Skills: teams build expertise in the platform they run, so a move needs retraining or outside support.
Customers told the CMA they value what AWS and Microsoft provide, and AWS has argued that every IT service carries switching costs. Both points hold, and they apply to private cloud and managed hosting as much as to hyperscalers. A useful approach is to list your dependencies, consider what each gives you and how much effort it would take to unwind, and keep the ones that earn their place.
To learn more, read our insight ‘How to avoid vendor lock in’.
How hard is migration in practice?
The legal timetable is short, and the practical timeline depends on your environment. Under the EU Data Act, providers must let customers switch on no more than two months’ notice, with a transition of up to 30 days, extendable to up to seven months where a provider shows 30 days is technically unfeasible. In the UK, the commitments to the CMA provide at least 180 days of free egress, so complex migrations can finish without losing it.
The real timeline is set by what surrounds the data: undocumented dependencies between applications, recreating networking and DNS, rebuilding identity and access, running old and new environments in parallel, and a final data synchronisation. Mapping dependencies first and agreeing cutover criteria in advance keeps a migration predictable. Our insight on migrating from VMware to OpenShift covers this process in more detail.
How can you keep your options open without leaving AWS or Azure?
Most businesses on AWS or Azure have good reasons to be there, and nothing in the regulatory changes requires them to move. Four steps help you stay prepared:
- Write down your exit plan: record what moves, where it goes, in what order, who does the work and what your contract says about notice, switching charges and data. Review it at each contract renewal.
- Keep portable what should be portable: containers, standard database engines and infrastructure defined in code move with less rework, so record which parts of your environment are portable and which deliberately are not.
- Hold your data in standard formats, with an independent copy: built-in redundancy does not replace a backup. AWS’s own guidance explains that spreading across Availability Zones protects against losing one location, while losing a whole Region needs a disaster recovery plan involving another Region. When damage to its Bahrain Region in 2026 exceeded what its design could withstand, AWS said it could not restore data hosted only there, and most customers restarted from backups or copies held elsewhere.
- Choose where each workload runs: public cloud suits variable demand or dependence on particular platform services, enterprise and private cloud suit steadier workloads that benefit from isolation and fixed monthly billing, and hybrid cloud connects them. For workloads that belong on AWS or Azure, managed public cloud helps you get more from them, with our certified engineers handling architecture, security, monitoring and optimisation.
Questions to ask any provider about exit and portability
These questions apply to any provider, including us.
- What is the exit process, and what does it cost, including data transfer charges?
- How much notice is needed, and what are the termination terms, including any committed spend?
- Which of the services you use are proprietary, and what is the nearest equivalent elsewhere?
- In what formats can your data be exported, and how long do you have to retrieve it after you leave?
- Do your software licences move with you?
- Where does an independent copy of your data sit, and who owns the exit plan?
Review your workload placement and exit readiness
Whatever the Commission decides in November, the questions that matter stay the same: where each workload runs, how portable it is, and how you would move it if you had to. Our Cloud Consultants can review your current setup with you, including how dependent it is on any one platform, and explain your options.
Speak to a Cloud Consultant about workload placement and exit readiness.
FAQs
What is a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act?
A gatekeeper is a large digital platform that the European Commission designates under the DMA because it acts as a key gateway between businesses and their customers. Gatekeepers must not favour their own products, must work with rival services and must let customers move their data. As of October 2026, AWS and Microsoft Azure are reported to be designated for their cloud services, although this has not been confirmed.
When do cloud switching charges end under the Data Act?
Switching charges end on 12 January 2027. Until then, charges are limited to the costs providers directly incur, and the rules apply to services provided to customers in the EU.
Does Hyve Managed Hosting manage AWS and Azure environments?
Yes. Hyve Managed Hosting provides managed public cloud services for AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, with certified engineers covering architecture, security, monitoring and optimisation, supported 24/7/365. The same engineers also design and manage private cloud, enterprise cloud, hybrid cloud and Red Hat OpenShift environments.
