Your renewal date is eight months away. Someone in the leadership meeting asks what it would cost to move to a European provider, and nobody in the room can answer. That silence is the lock-in problem. Nobody has priced the exit.
Most teams can describe their cloud estate. Fewer can put a number on leaving it. The audit below produces that number in four steps, using tools you already have.
Lock-in is a commercial risk, not an IT preference
Uncertainty about moving data and applications between providers stops many organisations from investing in more advanced cloud services. Around 25% of respondents to IDC’s annual Cloud View Enterprise Survey named portability as that barrier, according to a European Commission study on switching cloud providers.
Concentration makes it harder. The same study found that the top 5 public cloud providers grew their collective market share from 22% in 2013 to 31% in 2016, while the top 10 controlled 39%. In platform services alone (IaaS plus PaaS), the top 5 already held over 50% of the market in 2016.
The dependency starts before the cloud decision. In a survey of 1,222 IT decision makers across France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden, 94% of EU cloud users said they relied on Microsoft before moving to the cloud, and 84% still use Microsoft today (Open Cloud Coalition).
That pull now reaches AI procurement. Research for the Open Cloud Coalition, based on 1,250 UK and EU enterprise AI customers, found that 94% say existing business software influences which public cloud provider they choose when migrating from on-site systems, and 91% say their cloud provider influences which enterprise AI tools they use (Open Cloud Coalition). 56% feel restricted in using AI products not sold by their current cloud provider.
The four-step migration audit
Run this on one workload first, not the whole estate.
Step 1. Inventory proprietary dependencies
Document every vendor-specific service call, SDK and integration. Scan your Infrastructure-as-Code templates, including CloudFormation and Terraform files. Search your application code for provider SDK imports. Check CI/CD pipelines for provider-specific deployment tools. CloudQuery and Steampipe can scan across providers. List every function, table, bucket and stream you depend on.
Step 2. Test the data export for real
Do not trust the documentation. Create a test export, restore it on the European target, and measure time and data integrity. This validates export formats before you commit to a timeline.
Step 3. Calculate egress and parallel-run costs
Open your billing dashboard and analyse monthly data transfer volumes. Provider egress pricing runs from $0.05 to $0.12 per GB depending on provider and volume. Add the hidden cases: database replication to backup regions, logging to external SIEM tools, API responses to customers, content delivery to CDNs. Budget the one-time migration and the ongoing sync while both environments run.
Step 4. Map compatibility gaps and score each workload
Map every proprietary service to a European alternative and record what is missing. Then rate the migration route, using the scoring logic from SoftwareSeni’s lock-in assessment framework.
| Lock-in level | Signal | Route |
|---|---|---|
| High | Deep proprietary API integration | Refactoring required |
| Medium | Manageable adaptation needed | Replatforming |
| Low | Minimal changes | Lift and shift |
What this costs, and where it fails
The audit is not free. A thorough one takes weeks, and it will surface workloads you cannot move at a sensible price. Licensing is often the reason. 43% of EU cloud users say restrictive software licences increase costs for their organisations, and 28% of cloud users and providers report costs of €50,000 to €249,999 from those practices (Open Cloud Coalition).
Two limits are worth stating. Migration tooling covers the common services, compute, databases, storage and serverless functions, and reduces manual effort, but it does not remove the work of rewriting deep proprietary integrations (INISTA 2025). And portability is not only a technical problem. A Bournemouth University thesis on SaaS migration found that most solutions to lock-in are technology-oriented, while the decision process is where organisations get stuck (Opara-Martins).
The plan breaks on workloads with no European equivalent that meets your feature needs. Keep those and isolate them. Move what is portable, contain what is not, and stop the dependency spreading into new systems.
Start with one workload
Pick the workload with the lowest lock-in score. Run the four steps. You end up with a real cost and a real timeline, plus a defensible answer for the next leadership meeting. The same method works for any platform you cannot leave, including your omnichannel marketing stack.
Data Innovation is a Barcelona consultancy with more than 20 years in CRM and data. We build and operate intelligent systems, and our deliverability stack handles around 1B emails a month. We have run a EUR 5M deliverability recovery for a global FMCG client, and we hold an IESE research fellowship. If your situation looks like a renewal deadline with no migration number attached, we can help you build that number.