Promoting customer choice: AWS takes another step to lower costs for customers changing IT providers

Changing IT providers has always required time, effort, and money, but cloud computing has made that process easier than ever. Before cloud services, switching was often prohibitively difficult and expensive: over a multi-year process, companies would make up-front investments in new hardware and rewrite software to conform to their new provider’s proprietary operating system.

At AWS, we design cloud services to give customers the freedom to choose technology that best suits their needs, and our commitment to interoperability is a key reason customers choose AWS in the first place. Our open APIs and Software Development Kits (SDKs), services such as Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS Anywhere, as well as our hybrid infrastructure services like AWS Outposts and AWS Snow, allow customers and third parties to build compatible software and solutions. We have been at the forefront of developing technical solutions that allow customers to run their applications on AWS and still connect to other cloud providers, or on-premises, for any application dependencies.

We also interconnect directly with many other networks, including those of other cloud providers, to help customers enjoy a reliable data transfer experience across different providers and networks. If a customer decides to move to another IT provider, we want to remove barriers which make it harder to do so, because our focus is on building long-term customer trust and removing these barriers makes AWS attractive to new and returning customers.

Our customers make hundreds of millions of data transfers each day, and any time a customer transfers data using our infrastructure, there are inherent costs to enabling this. AWS has built a best-in-class global network by investing in networking solutions such as custom semiconductors, equipment and software, and millions of miles of terrestrial and undersea cable. These investments improve transfer speeds, reduce lag, and increase security and reliability across the entire AWS global network.

Just as AWS has innovated to reduce the cost of our different services, we work to reduce our data transfer costs and pass these cost savings on to our customers. Since 2021, over 90% of customers already pay nothing for data transfer fees out of AWS because we provide them with 100 gigabytes per month for free, to use for any purpose. We’re now taking this a step further for the small percentage of customers not captured by this free tier. Beginning today, customers globally, are now entitled to free data transfers out to the internet if they want to move to another IT provider. To get started, customers should contact AWS Customer Support.

While this change may help the small percentage of customers outside our free data transfer tier, the biggest barrier to changing cloud providers continues to be unfair software licensing. Some IT providers impose licensing restrictions on their software that make it financially unworkable for their customers to choose a cloud provider other than them. In some cases, it is impossible for customers to run the software on other popular cloud environments. This issue must be solved to promote customer choice, and like many others across the industry, we believe embracing the Principles for Fair Software Licensing is the best route to achieving this.

AWS offers industry-leading cloud services to millions of customers worldwide, and we will continue to innovate and help customers deploy in the cloud, grow their cloud footprint, and move data. Review these FAQs or contact AWS Customer Support for more information if you decide to move data off AWS.