The EU Data Act says that cloud service providers need to make it easy for people to switch.
After AWS and Google made similar moves, Microsoft has now said that it will also let business users move data out of its Azure cloud infrastructure with no “egress fees” attached.
Microsoft says that the statement was made voluntarily to help customers, but the fact that it was made public in a short blog post without much fanfare could mean that Microsoft had other goals in mind. In fact, the company said that it supports “customer choice, including the choice to migrate your data away from Azure.” Later, it admitted that this move also fits with the rules of the brand-new European Data Act, which goes into effect next year and is meant to encourage competition by making it easier to switch cloud providers.
Three-Way Bet
Microsoft Azure is one of the “big three” public cloud providers. It is in second place, behind AWS and Google, but not far behind. The last one said it would stop charging exit fees in January, and AWS did the same earlier this month.
At least according to customers and regulators, the main problem is that these tech giants charge to move data out of their clouds to somewhere else, like a rival service or their own internal infrastructure. Moving data into their clouds is free. Because of this, it might be too expensive to leave.
Like its competitors, such as AWS, Microsoft already let users move 100GB of data out of Azure for free every month. This could be useful for businesses that want to handle or analyze data, either on their own servers or on servers owned by other businesses. But companies that want to move everything off of Azure might have to pay a lot of money to do so. Today’s news helps to some extent with that problem.
Important Notes
Some people have already said that Microsoft’s move has too many caveats. One example is that it’s only for customers who want to end their relationship with Azure completely; these are called “exiting” customers. To get a refund on the egress fees, the customer must cancel all of their Azure subscriptions once their data has been transferred. So, if a company wants to use more than one cloud, including Azure, they will still have to pay exit fees after using up their 100GB monthly limit.
Because a lot of businesses will want to use some Azure services without going all in, this is important. In some ways, this move is just lip service for the EU’s new Data Act.
Civo’s CEO, Mark Boost, told TechCrunch, “There is no flexibility here to support the multi-cloud needs of modern businesses.” This is based on Civo’s website.
Also, Microsoft’s blog post doesn’t say this, but this help page says that the free transfer out only works for storage data. There will still be normal fees for moving data from other Azure services, like the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN).
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Boost went on, “Don’t be fooled by Big Tech’s apparent rush to get rid of egress exit fees.” But it’s clear that the hyperscalers still think that adaptability costs money.
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