Summary
- Only 11% of respondents believed their organisations could migrate business-critical workloads from their largest provider within three weeks.
- Some 79% expected AI adoption to increase dependence on a small number of providers over the next three years.
- Nearly three-quarters said they would pay at least 11% more for greater infrastructure independence, although this represents stated willingness rather than actual purchasing behaviour.
Nearly nine in ten executives surveyed by Leaseweb believe their organisations could not migrate business-critical workloads away from their largest cloud or infrastructure provider within three weeks, despite widespread confidence in their ability to control and move data.
The Leaseweb Digital Independence Survey 2026 questioned 800 C-suite executives across the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. Only 11% estimated that their organisations could complete such a migration within three weeks, while 55% expected the process to take more than three months or considered it currently impossible.
Censuswide conducted the research between 22 and 30 September 2026, surveying 200 executives in each country. Participating organisations employed between 500 and 5,000 people, meaning the results reflect a defined group of medium-sized and larger businesses rather than all organisations.
The findings reveal a difference between perceived control over information and the practical ability to move the workloads that use it. Some 76% of respondents said they had complete or high control over moving data between providers, yet far fewer believed they could migrate critical workloads quickly.
The Netherlands recorded the highest proportion of respondents expecting migration to require more than three months or to be currently impossible, at 65%. The comparable figures were 59% in the UK, 55% in the US, and 40% in Germany.
Dutch respondents reported an average estimated migration time of 4.7 months. These figures describe executives’ expectations, not independently timed migration projects or tests of the providers named by respondents.
Moving data is not the same as moving workloads
Cloud migration involves more than transferring information between storage systems. Applications may depend on particular databases, identity services, network configurations, management interfaces, and software capabilities supplied by their existing provider.
Changing platforms can therefore require substantial engineering work even where the underlying data remains accessible. Applications may need to be reconfigured or modified before they can operate under the technical and security arrangements of another infrastructure environment.
Some organisations also operate services that cannot easily be interrupted. Migrating business-critical workloads may require parallel infrastructure, testing, synchronisation of information, and arrangements for switching services without unacceptable disruption.
These requirements can increase both the time and expenditure associated with changing suppliers. The actual difficulty depends on the application’s architecture, the amount of data involved, contractual conditions, and the capabilities available at the destination.
Leaseweb found that 79% of respondents expected AI adoption to increase their dependence on a small number of providers over the next three years. The proportion reached 89% in the US, 83% in the UK, 76% in Germany, and 67% in the Netherlands.
AI systems can introduce additional infrastructure dependencies. Their operation may rely on specialised accelerators, high-capacity networking, particular software frameworks, or services whose capabilities are not directly interchangeable between providers.
The difficulty of reproducing an AI environment can depend on both the software and physical computing resources. A provider may be able to transfer data while still lacking access to suitable hardware capacity or the required supporting services elsewhere.
Lex Boost, co-CEO at Leaseweb, said: “Organisations may believe they control their data, but once applications have been built around a provider’s platform, moving them is rarely quick or simple.”
Control has a commercial price
Geopolitical concerns have also influenced infrastructure decisions. Leaseweb found that 78% of respondents had taken action to reduce dependence on a particular technology or infrastructure provider because of geopolitical pressures.
The proportion reached 91% in the US and 87% in the UK, while 45% of respondents overall planned to take further action. The survey does not establish which measures were taken or whether they produced a measurable improvement in portability.
Respondents also attached a financial value to independence. Some 73% said they would pay at least 11% more for greater control, reduced provider dependence, or increased freedom to move workloads, with the average indicated premium approximately 16%.
Willingness to pay was particularly high in the Netherlands, where 81% would accept a premium of at least 11%, followed by Germany at 79%. These responses measure stated preferences rather than completed transactions or contracted infrastructure expenditure.
Security and compliance findings raise a separate concern. Only 28% of respondents regarded regulatory and legal compliance as non-negotiable when choosing a cloud provider, while the same proportion selected security and data protection. Some 67% said they would accept at least a minor compliance trade-off.
Organisations remain subject to applicable legal requirements regardless of their purchasing preferences. A willingness to compromise in a survey does not remove duties relating to data protection, regulated services, or contractual security obligations.
Leaseweb has a commercial interest in infrastructure choice and migration as a provider of cloud and Infrastructure as a Service products. The findings should therefore be understood as supplier-commissioned research, rather than independent measurement of migration performance across the cloud market.
The results nevertheless provide a detailed indication of how executives perceive their infrastructure dependencies. They also complement existing scrutiny of cloud switching barriers in the UK, where regulators have examined the commercial and technical factors that can restrict movement between providers.
Reducing dependence may require more portable application designs, revised contracts, alternative hosting capacity, or additional operational arrangements. None of these measures guarantees a rapid migration, but the difference between owning data and being able to move the systems that process it remains a material infrastructure question.
