Moving computing into a rented data centre removed a and created a .
The initial saving is real, and the position after three years is what organisations underestimate.
Storage is cheap, computation is competitive and moving data out carries a charge that is not.
Those are the mechanism by which a competitive market produces an uncompetitive outcome.
Regulators in several regions have now limited or abolished them.
The deeper attachment is not the data but the services built around it.
An application written against a 's own tools cannot be moved without being rewritten.
Engineers choose those tools because they are genuinely better and because the cost of that choice appears years later.
Public bodies face this in a sharper form than companies do.
A ministry cannot easily accept that its records are readable only through one supplier's software.
rules that require an exit plan at the moment of purchase address this at almost no cost.
The plan is rarely executed and changes what is signed.
is the systemic question that individual contracts cannot reach.
Three s hold most of the market, and an at one of them now interrupts services in unrelated sectors simultaneously.
That correlation of failure is the argument for treating the sector as infrastructure, which no regulator has yet done in full.