Switching of Cloud Services Providers : executive summary

This is the Final Report of the study "SMART 2016/0032 - Switching of Cloud Services Providers "entrusted by the European Commission DG CONNECT to IDC and Arthur's Legal. The focus of the study is to gather evidence concerning the practices of cloud service providers in relation to data and application portability within cloud ecosystems. In this context, the analysis defines portability as follows: 'Data portability is the ability to easily transfer data from one cloud service provider to another cloud service provider without being required to export and re-import the data; similarly, application portability is the ability to easily transfer an application or application components from one cloud service to a comparable cloud service and run the application in the target cloud service'. Note that portability of data may, also, refer to the portability of data to the cloud customer's own IT systems; the latter option does not fall directly, though, under the scope of the present study. Considering the series of technical, legal and economic issues identified in the study as well as their impact on portability for different cloud stakeholders, the report elaborates on 3 different policy options to facilitate portability. First, it expands on the introduction of a mandatory right for portability under EU law identifying its main components. Second, it discusses existing soft law instruments for portability reflecting on their effectiveness to address the portability issues occurring in the cloud context. Third, it explains what abstinence from any action at EU level entails. Finally, the report examines the possible economic impacts of the policy measures that could be taken at EU level to increase cloud portability, as described above, by describing the possible effects of these on demand for public cloud services.