EU Data Act - light at the end of the tunnel

For many existing SAP customers, the path to the cloud resembles a forced journey to a promised IT kingdom of heaven, but the so-called FUE gospel (Full Use Equivalent) turns out to be a dangerous one-way street on closer legal and business analysis. While SAP CEO Christian Klein tirelessly praises the benefits of Rise with SAP as an all-round carefree package for digital transformation, an existential risk is systematically concealed: SAP has no de facto viable cloud exit strategy. Anyone who agrees to this contract is entering a deep vendor lock-in.

My SAP regulars have been trying to understand a potential cloud exit. We need to deconstruct the mechanics of SAP license transformation, is the mission from my regulars' table. In the traditional on-prem world, software licenses for systems like ECC were a capital expenditure (CapEx). With the switch to Rise, SAP is forcing us existing customers through contract conversion to hand over this valuable property at the pearly gates and convert it into a rental model (OpEx) in the form of cloud subscriptions.

If we regulars terminate this SAP cloud contract or want to opt out, our right of use evaporates instantly! The consequence is brutal: at the end of the contract, all the existing SAP customer is left with is the bare raw data, which is completely worthless without the associated SAP algorithms (see E3 cover story DMI, March 2026).

Reactivating the old ECC system is legally and technically impossible, as the on-prem licenses were irretrievably destroyed by the conversion. The only way out of this trap would be not to give up your own licenses in advance and to choose a bring-your-own-license (BYOL) model with an independent hyperscaler, which SAP tried to prevent me from doing through massive sales repression.

The situation becomes particularly toxic if the Rise project fails in the implementation phase and the envisaged cloud target is not even achieved. A Rise contract is a multidimensional construct that consists of at least the migration costs (conversion) and the ongoing cloud subscription. If a project is canceled because the S/4 transformation fails due to the complexity of the historically grown data structures, SAP may still be accommodating when it comes to the conversion costs, but insists relentlessly on the payments for the cloud subscription.

The existing SAP customer is then left with the wreckage of their ERP system in no man's land: they cannot return to the old on-prem world because the licenses have been surrendered, and they cannot move forward to the cloud because the implementation has failed.

In this power imbalance, our hopes are pinned on the new EU Data Act, which explicitly aims to break down lock-in effects and make it easier to switch cloud service providers. The law stipulates that providers must remove contractual and technical barriers to ensure data portability.

But the legal reality at SAP looks different. Although the EU Data Act represents a light at the end of the tunnel, SAP remains largely silent on the specific exit modalities and is waiting for standardized EU model contracts. A classic Rise contract is a legal revelation in which the SAP user only has obligations and hardly any rights.

From a compliance and IT security perspective, an unplanned SAP cloud exit is also like riding the razor's edge. Existing SAP customers are forced to proactively develop comprehensive data retention strategies in order to extract sensitive information in an audit-proof manner before the end of the contract, see DMI JiVS in the March 2026 issue of E3. At the same time, we remain fully responsible for compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and authorization management in the Rise model.

SAP Cloud is a strategic one-way function, a mathematical trapdoor function that makes entry temptingly easy, but blocks the exit with legal, financial and technical hurdles that threaten the existence of the company.