Your AWS bill arrives monthly. The egress charges keep growing. Your engineers mention something about “proprietary APIs” in standup. Meanwhile, your compliance team sends yet another email about NIS2 requirements and data sovereignty.
Here’s a number that should get your attention: 71% of businesses say vendor lock-in risks would deter them from adopting more cloud services. That’s not theoretical—it’s showing up in your budget, your regulatory assessments, and your strategic planning sessions.
The regulatory environment has shifted. NIS2 mandates supply chain risk assessment including cloud provider jurisdiction. The US CLOUD Act creates potential conflicts with GDPR Article 48. European regulators are asking hard questions about where your data lives and who can access it.
So what do you need? A systematic way to quantify your current lock-in exposure. A realistic estimate of what migration actually costs. And a phased approach that lets you move to sovereignty-aligned European infrastructure without disrupting your operations.
This guide is part of our comprehensive Understanding European Digital Sovereignty and the Movement Toward Independent Cloud Infrastructure, where we explore the strategic context behind the European independence movement and regulatory drivers pushing enterprises toward sovereign infrastructure.
This article walks through the assessment framework and migration methodology. We’ll cover API inventory, egress cost calculation, compatibility gap analysis, and workload prioritisation. You’ll finish with a clear picture of where you stand and what it takes to get where you need to be.
What is cloud vendor lock-in and why does it create business risk?
Cloud vendor lock-in happens when you become dependent on a single provider’s proprietary technology. Migration becomes prohibitively expensive or complex due to technical, economic, legal, or operational constraints.
There are four dimensions to this. Technical lock-in comes from proprietary APIs and vendor-specific integrations. Economic lock-in appears in pricing structures. Legal lock-in shows up in contract penalties and compliance gaps. Operational lock-in builds through process dependencies and skillset investments.
Each dimension manifests differently in your business. Technical lock-in? That’s your AWS Lambda functions that need refactoring to run anywhere else. DynamoDB schemas locked to the AWS ecosystem. Azure Active Directory integration threading through your entire stack.
Economic lock-in shows up in progressive egress pricing tiers that make leaving more expensive as you grow. Committed use discounts create exit penalties. Training investment becomes sunk cost.
Legal lock-in involves enterprise agreements with multi-year commitments. Compliance certifications tied to specific providers. Contractual obligations that make switching legally complicated.
Operational lock-in proves persistent. Your DevOps toolchains built around AWS CloudFormation. Monitoring systems dependent on Azure Monitor. Incident response playbooks that reference provider-specific services and interfaces.
The business risks are concrete. You lose vendor negotiation leverage as dependency increases. You can’t optimise costs through competition. Your compliance posture becomes vulnerable when EU sovereignty requirements clash with US provider jurisdiction.
The UK Cabinet Office estimated that overreliance on a single provider could cost public bodies £894 million. Basecamp projected $7 million in savings over five years by avoiding cloud lock-in. Those are real numbers.
The US CLOUD Act grants extraterritorial data access, creating regulatory concerns for European organisations using AWS, Azure, or GCP.
The real cost extends beyond egress fees. Migration costs including downtime and retraining often exceed 20-30% of annual cloud spend. For large datasets, egress fees alone range from $50,000 to millions.
How do I audit my current cloud environment for vendor lock-in risks?
You need a systematic framework. Four steps: proprietary API inventory, data export restriction analysis, egress fee calculation, and compatibility gap identification.
Start with API inventory. Document all vendor-specific service calls, SDKs, and integrations. Scan your Infrastructure-as-Code templates—CloudFormation, Terraform files. Grep through your application codebases for AWS SDK imports. Check your CI/CD pipelines for provider-specific deployment tools.
Use AWS Systems Manager Inventory for service usage tracking. Azure Resource Graph queries work for Azure environments. Third-party dependency scanners like CloudQuery and Steampipe can scan across providers.
The output should be comprehensive. Every Lambda function. Every DynamoDB table. Every S3 bucket with versioning enabled. Every Kinesis stream. Every proprietary service integration point.
Next, test data export restrictions. Don’t assume you can export data just because the documentation says you can. Actually try it. Create a test database export. Attempt restoration on a European provider. Measure time and data integrity.
The data portability testing validates export formats against intended target systems before you commit to migration timelines.
Third step: calculate egress fees. Pull up your billing dashboard. Analyse monthly data transfer volumes. Apply provider egress pricing tiers—$0.05-$0.12/GB depending on provider and volume.
Calculate both one-time migration cost and ongoing multi-cloud data sync expenses during parallel operation. Don’t forget hidden egress scenarios: database replication to backup regions, logging to external SIEM tools, API responses to customers, content delivery to CDNs.
Fourth step: compatibility gap analysis. Map each proprietary service to European alternatives. AWS Lambda to OVHcloud Functions. Azure Cosmos DB to STACKIT Database. Document missing features. Identify services requiring custom development or architectural changes.
Create a risk scoring matrix. High lock-in means requires refactoring—deep proprietary API integration. Medium lock-in needs replatforming—manageable adaptation required. Low lock-in is lift-and-shift compatible with minimal changes.
The deliverable? A quantified lock-in score across technical, economic, legal, and operational dimensions. Each workload gets a migration complexity rating.
Allow adequate time for this phase. A thorough audit takes 2-4 weeks for infrastructure with 50-200 services. The assessment determines whether your migration timeline is 12 months or 24 months, whether costs are $150K or $500K.
What are data egress costs and how do I calculate them for my migration?
Data egress fees are charges for transferring data out of a cloud provider’s network. They range from $0.05-$0.12 per GB depending on provider, region, and volume tier.
Moving data onto cloud storage is typically cost-free. Getting data out incurs significant charges. This asymmetry is deliberate—it makes migration economically painful.
Egress costs account for an average of 6% of organisations’ cloud storage costs. For large datasets, they accumulate to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
Provider pricing varies. AWS charges $0.09/GB after the first 100GB free monthly. Azure charges $0.087/GB after 100GB, with tiered pricing down to $0.05/GB at highest volumes. Google Cloud charges $0.12/GB.
AWS egress pricing tiers step down with volume: $0.09/GB for 10TB-50TB monthly, $0.085/GB for 50TB-150TB, $0.07/GB for 150TB and above. Rates vary by region.
European providers take a different approach. OVHcloud and Scaleway often offer significantly lower or zero egress fees for sovereignty-focused customers. OVHcloud charges €0.01/GB but often waives fees for large migrations. Scaleway offers competitive €0.01/GB egress pricing.
The calculation: (Total data volume in GB) × (Provider egress rate per GB) + (Ongoing sync volume during parallel operation period × Egress rate × Number of months) = Total egress cost.
Work through an example. 50TB dataset on AWS. That’s 51,200 GB. At $0.09/GB, base egress is $4,608. During a 3-month parallel operation period, ongoing sync traffic might be 10% of the dataset monthly—5TB or 5,120 GB per month. That’s $461 monthly, or $1,383 over three months. Total egress cost: $5,991, call it $6,000.
Scale that to 500TB. Base egress at $0.07/GB (you hit the volume discount tier) is $35,840. Three months of sync traffic at 50TB monthly is $10,752. Total: $46,592.
Hidden egress scenarios compound this. Database replication to backup regions triggers egress charges. Logging to external SIEM tools incurs data transfer fees. API responses to customers count toward egress usage. Content delivery to CDNs accumulates charges.
Moving data between cloud regions costs $0.09-$0.12 per GB. Traffic between services in the same AWS region costs $0.01 per GB.
Cost reduction strategies exist. Time migrations during low-traffic periods to minimise impact. Use provider data transfer services—AWS Snowball, Azure Data Box—for physical shipment of datasets over 10TB. This avoids egress entirely. Negotiate bulk transfer discounts with providers. Implement data compression before transfer.
Create an egress cost worksheet. Components: current monthly bandwidth usage, peak data transfer periods, database sizes, backup volumes, log retention volumes, API response payloads.
Plan for this cost element early. Egress costs derail migration projects when they appear late in planning. Calculate them upfront, include them in ROI analysis, and factor them into provider negotiations.
Which European cloud providers should I evaluate as alternatives to AWS and Azure?
The European cloud landscape spans infrastructure providers, platform services, and federated frameworks. 10 major European cloud providers operate today: OVHcloud, STACKIT, Cyso Cloud, Open Telekom Cloud, IONOS, Scaleway, UpCloud, Exoscale, ELASTX, and Nine. For detailed European cloud providers comparison including technical benchmarks, feature completeness analysis, and real-world case studies, see our comprehensive alternative platforms evaluation.
Here’s where the market sits right now: Around 80% of European corporate spending on cloud and software goes to US-based providers. European cloud providers demonstrate stable growth while facing market dynamics that favour incumbents with large enterprise agreements and extensive service portfolios.
OVHcloud is the largest European provider. French company, comprehensive IaaS/PaaS portfolio, 30+ data centres across the EU. They’ve operated for over 20 years. Strong bare metal offerings. GAIA-X founding member.
OVHcloud suits enterprises requiring full AWS/Azure feature parity with sovereignty guarantees. No egress fees for most services. Mature provider with proven track record at scale.
STACKIT is the German enterprise cloud. Schwarz Group subsidiary—that’s the Lidl parent company. They officially launched in 2024 with high momentum. Focus on GDPR compliance and data residency.
They target highly regulated industries: finance, healthcare, government. Managed Kubernetes, databases, application hosting. Strict German jurisdiction. Sovereign Cloud certification. Strong choice for organisations requiring German jurisdiction or serving customers with German data residency requirements.
Scaleway is the French developer-friendly provider. Emphasis on transparent pricing and cost-effective infrastructure. Strong for startups and SMBs. Managed AI and serverless services. GPU instances, managed databases, serverless functions. Object storage with competitive €0.01/GB egress.
Small instances cost €0.003/hour. Fast provisioning with good documentation. Developer experience is solid.
Exoscale operates from Switzerland. They leverage Switzerland’s strong data protection framework and political neutrality. Specialise in DBaaS including Kafka and OpenSearch.
Smaller service portfolio than OVHcloud or STACKIT, but high reliability and privacy focus. Swiss data protection exceeds EU standards. Excellent for financial services and sensitive data requiring maximum sovereignty outside EU jurisdiction.
The GAIA-X framework deserves mention. EU federated cloud initiative launched in 2020. Establishing interoperability standards, sovereignty certifications, and multi-provider portability.
GAIA-X operates as a non-profit association based in Belgium. Functions as an ecosystem of nodes interconnected via open standards rather than a single platform. Expanded to over 180 data spaces as of 2025.
Concrete examples include Catena-X for automotive and GAIA-X Health for healthcare. The framework prevents future lock-in through federation and interoperability.
Selection criteria matter. Sovereignty assurance level needed for compliance. Service feature parity with current AWS/Azure usage. Pricing competitiveness. Regulatory compliance certifications—GDPR, NIS2, ISO 27001. Data centre proximity to operations. Technical support quality.
Three sovereignty tiers exist. Tier 1 is basic EU jurisdiction—provider incorporated and data stored in EU, but may have US parent company or investors. Tier 2 is enhanced sovereignty—EU-owned with GAIA-X certification, staff in EU, no extraterritorial legal exposure. Tier 3 is maximum sovereignty—government-backed or critical infrastructure providers with military-grade separation from foreign influence.
NIS2 compliance typically requires Tier 2 minimum for systems handling sensitive data.
European providers typically price 15-30% cheaper on compute and storage, with significantly lower or zero egress fees. The managed service portfolio is smaller than AWS/Azure, so some features require self-hosting which adds operational overhead. Total cost of ownership often favours European providers once you factor in egress costs and sovereignty compliance value.
How do I prioritise workloads for a phased migration strategy?
Don’t attempt big-bang cutover. Break migrations into smaller, phased waves based on workload criticality and interdependencies.
The incremental approach reduces risk by validating methodology on non-critical workloads. You build team expertise with new platforms. You enable course correction. You maintain operational stability while learning.
Prioritisation framework has four dimensions. Technical lock-in depth—how deeply does the workload use proprietary APIs. Business criticality—what’s the revenue impact of downtime. Migration complexity—dependencies and integrations. Regulatory urgency—NIS2/DORA compliance deadlines.
Low-risk workload characteristics: stateless applications with minimal external dependencies. Containerised services with portable configurations. Dev/test environments. Services using standard APIs rather than proprietary features.
High-priority candidates for early migration? Development and testing environments—you validate the process without production risk. Internal tools and dashboards have limited user impact. Batch processing jobs are fault-tolerant with retry capability. Static content hosting involves simple storage migration.
Defer to later phases: mission-critical transaction systems. Applications with deep proprietary API integration. Complex data pipelines with multi-service dependencies. Services requiring significant refactoring. Legacy applications lacking documentation.
Timeline estimation: 2-3 months per phase including planning, migration, testing, and validation. A typical 5-phase migration spans 12-18 months.
Run workloads simultaneously on source and target providers during cutover. This parallel operation window provides protection. It’s your safety net. Parallel operation typically lasts 1-3 months per phase. You validate functionality, performance, and business outcomes before decommissioning incumbent infrastructure.
Something goes wrong with the European provider? You’re still operational on AWS or Azure. You discover performance issues? You have time to optimise before cutting over production traffic.
Working through phases builds confidence. Your team becomes competent with the European provider. Your runbooks get updated. Your monitoring adapts. Your incident response procedures evolve.
What is functional equivalence testing and how do I validate European alternatives?
Validation protocols verify European cloud alternatives deliver the same technical capabilities, performance benchmarks, and business outcomes as incumbent AWS/Azure services before production cutover.
Testing framework has four phases: feature parity validation, performance benchmarking, integration testing, and business process validation.
Feature parity assessment starts with comprehensive checklist. Document every AWS/Azure service feature you use in production. Test each feature on the European alternative. Document any missing capabilities or behavioural differences.
You’ll find gaps. Maybe the European provider’s managed Kubernetes doesn’t support every addon you use. Maybe database backup automation works differently. Maybe logging integration requires different API calls.
Document these gaps. Determine if they’re showstoppers or merely differences requiring adaptation.
Performance benchmarking establishes baseline metrics on your current provider. API response times, database query latency, storage throughput. Replicate the workload on European provider using identical test data. Compare results with acceptable variance thresholds—typically ±10-15%.
Gather workload metrics: CPU utilisation, memory usage, disk I/O, network throughput. You need quantitative comparison, not gut feel.
Integration testing deploys sample application using European provider services. Test all external integrations: payment processors, authentication providers, third-party APIs. Validate export formats against intended target systems. Make sure data flowing between systems maintains integrity and compatibility.
Parallel environment validation runs production-equivalent workload on both incumbent and target providers simultaneously for 2-4 weeks. Compare business metrics: transaction success rates, error frequencies, user experience indicators.
Route small percentage of production traffic to European provider initially—5-10%. Monitor closely. Identify and resolve discrepancies before full cutover.
Conduct user acceptance testing so end users replicate common day-to-day tasks and verify they work as expected. This uncovers issues that impact end users and helps teams prepare for the new environment.
Acceptance criteria: zero functionality gaps that block business operations. Performance within 10% of baseline. 99.9%+ integration compatibility. Business KPIs maintained or improved. Compliance requirements satisfied.
The cost of production issues exceeds the cost of thorough testing. Don’t skip testing to save time.
How do I estimate the total cost and timeline for cloud migration?
Total cost extends beyond egress fees. Migration labour, parallel operation overhead, downtime costs, retraining expenses, testing infrastructure, project management.
Labour cost estimation: (Complexity score 1-10) × (Number of services) × (8-40 hours per service). Multiply by fully-loaded developer hourly rate—typically $100-$200/hour including benefits and overhead.
Simple service—containerised app with standard APIs—takes 8-16 hours. Medium complexity—database with less than 1TB, some proprietary features—takes 24-40 hours. High complexity—deep AWS integration, large dataset—takes 80-160 hours.
Parallel operation costs: (Monthly infrastructure cost on source provider) + (Monthly infrastructure cost on target provider) × (Number of months in parallel operation).
Example: $50K monthly AWS spend + $40K monthly OVHcloud spend (20% cheaper) × 3 months = $270K parallel period cost. But you would have spent $150K on AWS during those three months anyway. Net additional cost: $120K.
Downtime cost calculation: (Hourly revenue) × (Expected downtime hours during cutover) + (Customer churn cost if service degradation occurs).
Schedule migrations at night, over weekend, or during low-traffic periods to reduce disruption risk. Blue-green deployment patterns and gradual traffic shifting reduce downtime from potential 8-24 hours to under 2 hours.
Retraining investment: (Number of engineers) × (40-80 hours training per person) × (Hourly cost) + third-party training courses.
Don’t train everyone upfront. Start with 2-3 engineers becoming experts on target European provider during assessment and phase 1 migration. They serve as internal champions. Gradual knowledge transfer as more workloads migrate.
European providers use similar paradigms to AWS/Azure—VMs, containers, managed databases. Learning curve is moderate. Budget 40-80 hours per engineer for competency, primarily through hands-on migration work rather than formal training.
Example migration profile: organisation with 100 services, AWS spend $50K/month, 5 engineers. Total cost $150K-$300K breakdown: egress $10K, labour $100K-$200K, parallel operation $30K-$60K, training $10K-$20K. Timeline 12-18 months for complete migration. For comprehensive migration cost calculation frameworks including ROI modelling and economic planning tools, see our detailed financial analysis guide.
Timeline breakdown: Assessment phase 2-4 weeks. Planning phase 1-2 weeks. Migration waves—3-5 phases at 2-3 months each—equals 10-15 months. Optimisation phase 1-2 months. Total 12-18 months with 20-30% buffer for unexpected issues.
Faster migrations—6-9 months—increase risk of issues and require more parallel resources. Slower migrations—18-24 months—reduce risk but extend cost and complexity.
ROI timeline: sovereignty compliance value realised immediately. Cost savings from cheaper European providers typically offset migration investment within 18-24 months post-completion.
What’s the difference between rehost, replatform, and refactor migration strategies?
Three approaches exist, each with different tradeoffs.
Rehost—lift-and-shift—moves applications with minimal changes. Fastest approach but preserves some lock-in. You’re moving VMs or containers to new infrastructure without architectural changes.
Suitable for exiting ageing data centres quickly. Meeting compliance deadlines. Reducing short-term operational costs. You get sovereignty benefits without refactoring investment.
Replatform makes minor adaptations. Switch managed database services. Replace AWS-specific SDKs with open-source equivalents. Balances speed and lock-in reduction.
Most migrations fall into the replatform category. You’re adapting to European provider’s managed services without complete redesign.
Refactor redesigns applications using portable open-source technologies. Maximises sovereignty and portability but requires most time and investment.
Choose refactor when applications are due for modernisation anyway. When technical debt justifies rebuild. When proprietary lock-in is so deep that replatform would be nearly as expensive as refactor.
Most migrations use mixed strategy. Rehost low-risk workloads. Replatform majority of services. Refactor deeply locked-in applications.
Should I adopt a multi-cloud strategy instead of complete migration?
Multi-cloud can reduce dependency on any single provider and enable cost optimisation across platforms. However, it increases operational complexity requiring expertise across multiple platforms, cross-provider tooling, and distributed monitoring.
76% of companies were already running two or more public clouds in 2020.
Multi-cloud doesn’t fully address sovereignty concerns if US providers remain in mix. You still have US CLOUD Act exposure on workloads running on AWS or Azure.
Complete migration to European provider is simpler operationally and provides stronger sovereignty assurance for NIS2/DORA compliance. You’re consolidating onto one new platform rather than managing multiple simultaneously.
Consider multi-cloud when you have genuinely different requirements. Maybe some workloads need specific hardware—GPUs, specialised compute—only available from certain providers. Maybe geographic distribution requires local providers in different markets.
For most organisations pursuing sovereignty compliance, complete migration to European provider makes more sense than multi-cloud complexity.
What happens to my data if migration fails midway?
Phased migration with parallel operation provides rollback capability. Workloads remain operational on source provider until European alternative is validated in production.
Maintain full backups on both platforms during transition. Most migration failures occur during testing phase before production cutover. This allows course correction without customer impact.
Don’t decommission source infrastructure until 2-4 weeks of stable operation on target provider. Keep rollback option available.
The phased approach means partial migration failure affects only current phase workloads. Other workloads continue operating on source provider. You pause migration, fix issues, resume when ready.
Data integrity is protected through validation at every step. Export testing during assessment. Functional equivalence testing before cutover. Parallel operation comparing results. Multiple checkpoints catch problems before they reach production.
What regulatory drivers make cloud migration to European providers urgent?
Multiple regulations converged in 2024-2025 making sovereign European infrastructure necessary for compliance rather than optional strategic choice. These drivers are part of the broader digital sovereignty landscape reshaping European technology independence.
NIS2 Directive—operational resilience requirements effective October 2024—mandates supply chain risk assessment including cloud provider jurisdiction.
DORA—Digital Operational Resilience Act for financial entities, effective January 2025—requires ICT third-party risk management.
The US CLOUD Act grants extraterritorial data access to the US government regardless of where data physically resides. When using AWS, Azure, or GCP, American authorities can compel these companies to provide access to data stored in Europe—even if that data belongs to non-US persons. This directly conflicts with GDPR Article 48, which prohibits foreign authorities from accessing EU data without international agreement.
EU Data Act requires cloud switching portability starting 2025. Our guide on Navigating EU Data Act and Digital Markets Act Cloud Compliance Requirements provides detailed coverage of Data Act switching procedures and functional equivalence requirements you’ll need to meet.
Together, these regulations push enterprises toward European infrastructure. Compliance teams are flagging US cloud providers as supply chain risks. Audit requirements demand documentation of data sovereignty measures.
The timeline pressure is real. Companies subject to NIS2 are conducting supply chain risk assessments now. Those assessments identify US cloud providers as jurisdictional risks requiring mitigation.
How do I maintain compliance during the migration transition period?
Parallel operation doesn’t create compliance gaps if executed properly.
First, ensure European provider meets NIS2/DORA requirements before migrating any regulated data. Verify certifications. Review data processing agreements. Confirm jurisdiction and legal protections.
Second, document data flows during transition for audit purposes. Which data resides where. Which systems access which datasets. How long parallel operation lasts.
Third, maintain encryption and access controls on both platforms. Security standards don’t degrade during migration.
Fourth, update Data Processing Agreements to cover both providers during parallel period.
Fifth, conduct compliance audit before decommissioning source infrastructure. Verify all regulated data has migrated successfully. Confirm no compliance gaps exist in new environment.
Migration itself demonstrates compliance improvement toward sovereignty requirements. You’re actively reducing supply chain risk by moving to European jurisdiction.
Can I migrate databases without downtime?
Yes, using replication-based migration. Set up European provider database as replica of AWS/Azure primary. Let replica catch up to source—this takes hours to days depending on size.
During maintenance window, stop writes to source. Verify replica fully synchronised. Switch application connection strings to European database. Resume operations.
Downtime reduced to minutes rather than hours required for export/import approach. Your maintenance window becomes database cutover time, not data transfer time.
This works for most relational databases and many NoSQL systems. Replication protocols exist between platforms. You may need intermediate steps—replicate to open-source database first, then to European provider’s managed service.
Test the process on non-production environment first. Measure actual cutover time. Verify data integrity post-migration. Build confidence before production cutover.
What are the biggest mistakes companies make during cloud migration?
Top failures: underestimating proprietary API dependencies discovered late in migration. Insufficient functional equivalence testing leading to production issues. Inadequate cost estimation excluding parallel operation and retraining expenses.
Attempting big-bang cutover instead of phased approach. Failing to maintain rollback capability by decommissioning source infrastructure prematurely. Skipping comprehensive workload assessment and prioritisation, leading to inefficient sequencing.
Learn from these. Do thorough assessment upfront. Test rigorously before cutover. Budget realistically including indirect costs. Migrate in phases. Keep rollback capability until confident in new platform.
The assessment phase pays for itself by preventing late discoveries and scope expansion.
What if European providers don’t offer equivalent services to AWS proprietary features?
Three approaches exist.
First, find open-source alternatives you can self-host on European infrastructure. Use Apache Kafka instead of AWS Kinesis. PostgreSQL instead of DynamoDB where data model permits.
Second, accept temporary multi-cloud architecture keeping specific service on AWS whilst migrating everything else. Not ideal for sovereignty, but pragmatic when alternatives don’t exist.
Third, custom development to replicate functionality using European provider primitives. Build what you need using building blocks available.
Compatibility gap analysis during assessment phase identifies these scenarios early for planning. You make architectural decisions with full information rather than discovering blockers during migration.
Do I need to retrain my entire engineering team for European cloud providers?
Not immediately. Start with 2-3 engineers gaining expertise during assessment and phase 1 migration, then expand knowledge transfer as you progress through additional phases.
Learning curve is moderate since European providers use familiar patterns—VMs, containers, managed databases similar to AWS/Azure.
Budget 40-80 hours per engineer for competency. People learn through hands-on migration work rather than formal training. Migration work becomes training.
Documentation matters. Your internal champions document patterns, gotchas, differences from AWS/Azure. This institutional knowledge accumulates as you progress through phases.
How do European cloud providers compare on pricing to AWS and Azure?
European providers typically run 15-30% cheaper on compute and storage, with lower or zero egress fees. OVHcloud and Scaleway particularly competitive for standard workloads.
Managed service portfolio is smaller than AWS/Azure. Some features require self-hosting which adds operational overhead.
Total cost of ownership calculation needs to include operational overhead of self-hosting versus managed services. Factor in egress costs—often zero on European providers versus $0.09/GB on AWS. Consider sovereignty compliance value—avoiding regulatory penalties or passing compliance audits.
Total cost of ownership is often favourable for European providers once all factors considered. Compute and storage savings plus eliminated egress fees outweigh operational overhead of slightly less managed service coverage.
Run TCO analysis for your specific usage patterns. Don’t rely on generic comparisons. Your workload characteristics determine actual costs.
The assessment framework and migration methodology give you systematic approach to moving from US hyperscalers to European sovereign cloud infrastructure. You now have the tools to quantify lock-in exposure, estimate true migration costs, and execute phased transition.
Start with the four-step audit: API inventory, data export restrictions, egress fee calculation, compatibility gap analysis. This quantifies where you stand.
Choose European providers based on sovereignty assurance level, service feature parity, and pricing. OVHcloud for enterprise scale, STACKIT for German jurisdiction, Scaleway for cost-effectiveness, Exoscale for maximum sovereignty.
Prioritise workloads for phased migration. Start with low-risk, high-value candidates. Build expertise and confidence. Scale to more complex workloads.
Validate through functional equivalence testing. Feature parity, performance benchmarking, integration testing, parallel operation. Prove the European alternative works before cutover.
Budget realistically. Include egress fees, migration labour, parallel operation, retraining, testing infrastructure. Timeline 12-18 months for complete migration. When you’re ready to execute, our guide on Implementing Data Act Switching Procedures and Deploying European Infrastructure provides step-by-step implementation procedures and deployment methodologies.
The regulatory environment demands action. NIS2, DORA, GDPR Article 48 conflicts with US CLOUD Act. European sovereignty compliance is no longer optional for regulated industries.
Take the first step. Run the assessment. Quantify your lock-in. Get visibility into what migration actually entails. Make informed decisions with complete information rather than assumptions.
