AWS removes transfer fees for customers leaving with their data

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has decided to waive data transfer fees for enterprise customers moving their business to another cloud provider. Google made a similar announcement in January.

“Starting today, we’re waiving data transfer out to the internet (DTO) charges when you want to move outside of AWS,” the company wrote in a blog post, adding that the move follows the direction set by the European Data Act and is available to all AWS customers around the world and from any AWS Region.

Experts said that other cloud service providers will have to follow suit in order to ease scrutiny from regulators in the UK and Europe concerned about anti-competitive behavior.

Last July, UK communications regulator Ofcom called on the country’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to investigate possible anti-competitive practices in the cloud infrastructure market.

Ofcom’ report said existing cloud customers in the UK were paying more than they should for their cloud infrastructure, or having to settle for low-quality services, and that the regulator had heard concerns from some customers about their inability to switch or use multiple providers.

While Ofcom suggested remedies such as removing the data transfer fees completely, Google said that data transfer fees were a fraction of what enterprises spend on its cloud services.

Google, AWS, and Microsoft, also targeted in the report, defended their positions and disagreed with many of the report’s findings, including that high data transfer fees increased the cost of passing data between applications hosted with different providers, or of switching providers.

The new proposal from AWS only addresses the latter issue, that of switching providers.

It was the same with Google Cloud’s announcement in January that it would offer departing enterprise customers free network data transfer to migrate their data out of Google Cloud.

Fees: a waiver

The process isn’t automated at either company: Customers must ask support for a waiver — and neither has made the process of getting the waiver easy.

At AWS, for example, enterprises will need to send in requests to AWS support, and wait for approval before they can receive a credit for the cost of migrating the data, the company said.

Customers with only a small amount of data in Amazon’s cloud may be able to move it out for free without special permission, though: Currently, AWS offers 100GB per month of transfers for free from services such as EC2, S3, and Application Load Balancer. In addition, the company offers one terabyte of free data transfer out of Amazon CloudFront every month.

Google, too, has a similar process, wherein an application needs to be submitted for a case-by-case review of the Google Cloud team in order to process the fee waiver.

While AWS will offer the free transfer to enterprises maintaining other activities in its cloud, Google requires an enterprise to end its relationship with the company and move all its data out of Google Cloud within 60 days of eligibility approval.

Companies needn’t fear they’re burning their bridges, the AWS blog post said: “You’re welcome to come back at any time.”

But chancers hoping to get regular data transfers for free are likely to be caught: “We will, of course, apply additional scrutiny if the same AWS account applies multiple times for free DTO,” the post said.