AWS removes transfer fees for customers leaving with their data

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.