The EU Data Act challenges SAP’s control over data

For years, most organizations have assumed a simple truth: if it’s your data, you control how it’s used. But that assumption is starting to break down.

As data platforms become more centralized and AI increases the value of data, control is increasingly defined not by ownership, but by the terms set by vendors, like how data can be accessed, where it can be moved, and who can use it. What looks like a technical decision about architecture quickly becomes a legal and commercial one.

The EU Data Act represents a clear attempt to rebalance power, giving businesses greater control over their data, reducing vendor lock-in, and enabling a more open, competitive data ecosystem.

This creates a growing gap between how data platforms are designed to operate and how regulation expects data to be used.

[CTA_MODULE]

Where SAP’s data policies diverge from the EU Data Act

To see how this plays out in practice, it helps to look at how common SAP data policies compare to what the EU Data Act is trying to enable, especially when it comes to flexibility, control, and interoperability.

1. Cloud switching and vendor lock-in

• SAP’s approach: SAP explicitly designs its contracts to lock your data within its ecosystem. Business Data Cloud (BDC) Connect cannot be used as a pass-through pipeline to other tools. You are strictly forbidden from allowing connected third-party systems (like Databricks or Snowflake) to distribute data products to subsequent systems outside of the SAP BDC ecosystem. Furthermore, SAP expressly prohibits the mass extraction of any data unless you are moving it to another SAP-owned database.
• The EU Data Act: The legislation targets this exact behavior. It introduces strict rules establishing a framework for customers to switch between different providers of data-processing services to unlock the cloud market and eliminate artificial technical or commercial barriers to interoperability. The act even mandates the phased removal of switching fees, signaling a zero-tolerance policy for financial and technical vendor lock-in.

2. Data control, ownership, and IP overreach

• SAP’s approach: SAP legally asserts intellectual property (IP) ownership over your data products. Customers only receive a license to use their own enriched data.
  
  • The reality of SQL and IP: We have to ask what actually is a data product under the hood? In most cases, it is simply a collection of SQL queries — joining tables, filtering out specific rows, and aggregating metrics based on your own raw business data. By claiming IP over these data products, SAP is essentially trying to claim ownership over standard SQL logic and basic data modeling. In the broader tech industry, functional data transformations (like joining a 'Customer' table to an 'Orders' table) lack the creative threshold required to be considered intellectual property. Yet, SAP uses complex contractual language to claim ownership over how you organize your own information.
• The EU Data Act: The act is designed to empower both consumers and businesses by granting greater control over their data. It explicitly pushes back against vendor overreach. The legislation prevents software providers from using broad, catch-all IP, copyright, or trade secret claims as a loophole to stop users from accessing, porting, or sharing the data they generated. Instead, any such claims must be narrowly tailored to protect legitimate business interests, like cybersecurity risk. It draws a clear line between a vendor's underlying proprietary software and the functional data models, queries, and outputs generated by the user's business.

3. Data sharing and API access

• SAP’s approach: SAP prohibits the use of its APIs or third-party applications to extract data out of its cloud service and into third-party non-SAP software, data warehouses, or data lakes. Connectors cannot distribute data products to systems other than BDC, which is mentioned in SAP’s Business Data supplement, found here. 
• The EU Data Act: The legislation explicitly prohibits unfair contracts that might prevent data-sharing. It aims to lay the foundation for a fair and competitive data economy by mandating that users can share their data with third parties of their choice, effectively nullifying contractual clauses that exist solely to protect a vendor's monopoly on data processing. Unfair, unilaterally imposed clauses in B2B data-sharing agreements are no longer enforceable.

Regulations like the EU Data Act are starting to give enterprises more leverage when it comes to how their data can be accessed and used, especially in environments where vendor policies can limit flexibility. For organizations, this creates an opportunity to rethink how data flows across systems. Instead of navigating evolving policies or restrictive terms, teams have options to keep their data accessible and usable.

Access your ERP data on your terms

Organizations should have the flexibility to access and use their ERP data in the environments that best support their business, whether that’s for analytics, operations, or AI.

In practice, that means moving beyond architectures where data is tightly coupled to a single system and instead adopting a more open, flexible foundation, like an Open Data Infrastructure (ODI). Open Data Infrastructure enables storing data in open formats, decoupling storage from compute and making it accessible across tools and platforms without duplication or rework.

With Fivetran, this approach becomes practical. Data from SAP and other ERP systems can be continuously delivered into a centralized, governed environment in the cloud of your choice, where it can be used alongside data from across the business. This allows teams to work from a consistent, up-to-date view of their data while supporting a wide range of use cases from reporting and analytics to AI-driven workflows.

The result is greater flexibility, reduced operational overhead, and the ability to evolve your data strategy as your needs change without being constrained by where your data originates.

[CTA_MODULE]