Switching costs are the money, time, and operational friction required to move from one provider to another. In cloud security, they often include data export work, reconfiguring identities and access controls, rewriting integrations, and validating that backups and logs still work after the move. High switching costs can create lock-in, where a customer stays with a provider even if the service is risky, expensive, or difficult to secure.
Cyber defenders care about switching costs because they affect resilience. If an organization cannot leave a provider quickly, an outage, breach, or contract dispute can have a larger blast radius. Attackers may exploit that dependence by targeting proprietary APIs, custom formats, or tightly coupled authentication paths, knowing migration will be slow. Defenses aim to lower switching costs with portable data formats, documented runbooks, standardized interfaces, tested backups, and exit plans that can be executed without reengineering the whole stack.