The Six-Month Sprint: Preparing for the Compliance Horizon
This is the part that keeps CTOs up at night, and for good reason. Imagine the Commission delivers a final designation decision in November 2026—a year from now. You won’t have another year to adjust. The DMA mandates a swift transition period: a maximum of **six months** for the newly designated cloud services to achieve full compliance with all required obligations.
A six-month window for fundamental technical and contractual restructuring is *fast*. This isn’t about changing a pricing sheet; it’s about potentially re-architecting APIs, changing data egress policies, and renegotiating high-volume enterprise agreements across the entire European footprint. The Commission is deliberately designing this sprint to prevent prolonged market distortion while still allowing for the heavy lifting involved in overhauling core cloud architecture.
Actionable Takeaway #1: Start Your Cloud Portability Audit Now
If the clock hits midnight and AWS or Azure are designated, you need to know *exactly* what it will take to move a critical workload. Don’t wait for the final rule to be published. Assume the worst-case scenario—designation—and plan backward. . Find out more about EU probe cloud computing services Amazon Microsoft.
Here is a practical checklist for your internal team, which should be initiated immediately:
This process will give you a “Compliance Readiness Score.” A low score means you need to be lobbying your vendor *now* for contractual assurances or prioritizing refactoring work in your 2026 roadmap.
The Shadow of Outages: Why Regulation Feels So Urgent
It’s impossible to discuss the timing of these probes without mentioning the very real operational risks that underline the political will. The urgency is not purely theoretical; it’s rooted in recent history. Just last month, a significant disruption at AWS knocked services offline for 15 hours, affecting countless companies, from banking services to major retail operations. Not long before that, Microsoft Azure suffered its own highly publicized issues in October.
These outages, which cascade through supply chains and stop digital commerce, are the clearest evidence to regulators that dependency on two providers means systemic risk for the entire digital economy. When infrastructure failures on this scale happen, they don’t just affect one company; they ripple across the continent. This reality fuels the political necessity for the DMA’s intervention—the idea that the market, left to its own devices, might not build in the resilience or openness that a strategic sector requires. For readers interested in the technical aftermath, our piece on cloud resilience and disaster recovery in 2025 offers tactical advice on mitigating the *next* inevitable outage.
The Competitive Defense: Innovation vs. Stifling Growth
Naturally, the reaction from the giants has been predictable. AWS and Microsoft are arguing that the DMA’s regulatory hammer is too blunt an instrument for the dynamic cloud sector. Their line of defense, often communicated through spokesperson statements, centers on the idea that designation isn’t “worth the risks of stifling invention or raising costs for European companies”.
It’s a compelling narrative: *We are innovating at breakneck speed, and regulation will slow that down.* While there is always a tension between proactive regulation and unchecked innovation, the Commission’s perspective is weighted by the established market share. They see 70% of the market concentrated among three players and argue that for the market to truly be “dynamic,” competition needs an artificial nudge via the DMA’s obligations. It forces the incumbents to open their walled gardens, potentially creating space for the 15% of local providers to scale up and innovate within that ecosystem.
If you are a smaller European cloud player, this is your moment. The regulatory spotlight will illuminate opportunities for integration and partnership. Your focus over the next 12 months should be on developing services that specifically solve the interoperability and data portability problems the Commission is investigating. You need to be ready to plug into the behemoths if the DMA forces an open port.
The Road to Final Determination: What to Expect Over the Next 12 Months. Find out more about EU probe cloud computing services Amazon Microsoft strategies.
The 12-month investigation period will not be quiet. It will be a period of intense information gathering, submissions from market participants (including you and your competitors), and likely, informal discussions with the Commission’s investigators.
Here is a likely roadmap for the coming year:
For those who study the regulatory landscape closely, this whole process is a massive real-time case study. It’s the first major application of the DMA to the infrastructure layer, which is far more complex than consumer-facing apps. The outcome here will set a precedent for how the EU regulates *all* essential digital infrastructure. For more context on similar regulatory timelines, see our overview of the EU Digital Services Act enforcement schedule for comparison.
The Six-Month Compliance Countdown (Post-Designation Scenario)
If the decision lands against them, the clock immediately starts ticking toward that six-month compliance deadline. This is where operational inertia becomes your biggest enemy. Your compliance action plan needs to anticipate this hard stop:
- Contingency Planning is Key: Your IT architecture team must have already modeled what a “DMA-compliant” version of your cloud setup looks like. This includes data migration pathways and, critically, the cost of *non-compliance*—which under the DMA can reach up to 10% of global annual turnover. That penalty alone can dwarf any potential migration expense.. Find out more about Digital Markets Act gatekeeper designation timeline definition guide.
- Vendor Management Overhaul: If you are an enterprise customer, you may find your AWS or Azure account manager suddenly far more amenable to discussing interoperability features or contractual carve-outs. Use this leverage *now*. If they are preparing for a compliance sprint, they will be motivated to secure long-term contracts *before* the new rules take effect.
- Focus on Core Data: Prioritize compliance efforts for the services that generate the most essential, proprietary data. This is your highest lock-in risk and where the DMA obligations will bite hardest.
Conclusion: Charting Your Course in the Cloud’s New Era
The European Commission has drawn a line in the sand as of November 18, 2025. We are now in a defined, one-year assessment period leading up to a potential six-month compliance sprint for AWS and Microsoft Azure. This is not a drill. The urgency is real, amplified by recent operational failures and the undeniable concentration of market power, where the top three providers control 70% of the European cloud business.
Your key takeaways as a business leader charting the future are:. Find out more about European Commission AWS investigation duration insights information.
The cloud is the foundation of the future, and the EU is determined to ensure that foundation is built on fair and competitive ground. The next year will define the operating terms for that foundation for the decade to come. What is the first dependency you are going to audit tomorrow? Let us know in the comments below—the conversation about cloud competition starts now.
