The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has released its first interim paper for its investigation into anti-competitive behaviour in the cloud market, revealing significant barriers as companies try to adopt multi-cloud strategies.

The preliminary paper was released as the CMA continues their investigation has affirmed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure are dominating the cloud market, with Google taking up the third spot. Other independent cloud providers are  being squeezed by egress fees.

A lack of interoperability in interfaces, authentication, and platforms were major hurdles stopping customers from adopting multi-cloud.

The potential fall outs of multi-cloud – its expensive cost and associated complexity  – often outweigh the sometimes vague benefits of adopting a multi-cloud strategy, often preventing customers from pursing this strategy.

Egress fees, one of the main concerns that prompted the initial investigation, were also seen as a barrier, but the CMA found that these were not front of mind when customers were looking to switch. The extra fees to transfer data to rivals were often expected, even if they were exorbitant. The acceptance of these extra and often prohibitory fees, however, is a concern for fair market competition and consumer rights.

Customers did seem concerned about the transparency of these egress fees, though they were generally accepted.

Switching not only brought cost and operational risk, the CMA found, but it took IT staff away from core work and was more complex and time consuming that teams anticipated.

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On the technical side, cloud customers cited tech barriers like portability of code, incompatible data formats, and difficulty in migrating databases and file storage systems.

Egress fees were even affecting the ability for customers to use multi-cloud strategies for cloud backups, which can leave them at greater security risk they rely on the same provider for all of their cloud data backups.

The CMA’s report also highlighted that AI will only heighten competition and vendor lock-in.

“Concern does also exist,” said paper read, “that once an AI solution is chosen, it will be difficult to switch away from, creating another opportunity for cloud providers to potentially lock customers into their cloud offering.”

While the paper did not constitute a final judgement, it does confirm some of the major and more technical details regarding anti-competitive behaviours among cloud providers.