To ensure a competitive market in the EU, customers of data processing services, including cloud and edge services, must be able to switch seamlessly between providers. This benefits customers by allowing them to choose services that best meet their needs, while also benefiting providers by expanding their potential customer base. However, significant barriers currently hinder this flexibility, including high costs for data egress, lengthy switching procedures, and a lack of interoperability between providers, which can lead to the loss of data and applications.

The Data Act, coming into force on 12 September 2025, aims to address these challenges by ensuring that switching between providers is free, fast, and seamless. This presentation will describe and demonstrate a new open-source virtualization layer developed within the IPCEI-CIS project to further facilitate smooth transitions between data processing services.

This integrated virtualization system ensures interoperability by providing a control plane that manages distributed resources, virtual machines, and Kubernetes clusters across multiple cloud providers. It also guarantees portability, enabling applications to run seamlessly on any provider without the need for conversion. Additionally, it supports efficient migration of applications between providers with minimal downtime.

The demo will showcase a testbed combining resources from six EU cloud providers and resources from U.S. providers to illustrate the migration of workloads. This initiative demonstrates how the new virtualization layer enables true flexibility and portability in the cloud ecosystem, driving the vision of a competitive and interoperable cloud market in Europe.