At issue are factor such as egress fees, the charges that customers pay to transfer their data out of a cloud. Hyperscalers – such as AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft – set them at significantly higher rates than other providers.
“The cost of egress fees can discourage customers from using services from more than one cloud provider or to switch to an alternative provider,” according to Ofcom.
Technical barriers to interoperability and portability, factors that mean that customers need to reconfigure their data and application to work on different clouds, and committed spend discounts are also an issue in alleged vendor lock-in and restrictive practices in the cloud.
