Microsoft announces in a short message posted on its dedicated support site that it has ended the exit fees applied to users who wish to migrate their data from Azure to a third-party provider.
Until now, the main players in the cloud sector charged users who wanted to recover data sent to their cloud service in order to migrate, for example, to another provider or simply repatriate their data to their own servers.
Microsoft is not the first to make this type of announcement: in January, Google Cloud Platform was the first to make an announcement of this type, followed in February by Amazon Web Services. With Azure, the three major players in the enterprise cloud market have now aligned on a similar policy.
Free provided you leave completely
In the case of Azure, Microsoft nevertheless clarifies that this end of exit fees only applies to users ready to completely end their use of Azure services, by elegantly redirecting its interested users to the page explaining how cancel and delete your Azure subscription.
Google Cloud has a similar policy and only AWS does not require account closure to benefit from free exit fees.
The first dose is free
Called exit fees or “egress fees” in English, these exit rates varied depending on the quantity of data concerned by this exfiltration: a study carried out by the French company Holori in April 2023 estimated that to remove 50 TB of data hosted at Azure Web Services, you had to pay on average $4,300, $3,450 for Google Cloud or $3,392 at Azure.
On the other hand, these exit fees are minimal or non-existent for players less present on the market: OvhCloud and Scaleway do not charge exit fees according to Holori.
The reasoning put forward by Holori to explain this tendency of “hyperscalers” to charge upon exit is linked to their economic model. According to them, the biggest players in the market offer to support new entrants and encourage them to move their services to the cloud by offering them discounts and personalized support, but make it more difficult to exit the supplier’s ecosystem through these costs imposed and fluctuating depending on the options and offers subscribed to by the customer.
The fault (or grace) of the Data Act
If AWS, Google and Microsoft suddenly decide to put an end to this practice, it is obviously not because of a sudden burst of generosity.
In Europe, the upcoming entry into force of the Data Act will force them to abandon exit taxes anyway, with the European text imposing several obligations aimed at facilitating interoperability and switching from one cloud ecosystem to another. This text must come into force in September 2025, so those mainly concerned are getting a head start, especially since the digital markets regulation (DMA) also provides for similar obligations.
European action is welcomed by the “small” players in the cloud market, who are struggling to fight against the American and Chinese giants who share the bulk of the market. But the end of exit fees is only a step as highlighted by the CISPE, an organization which brings together European cloud service and hosting providers.
Next step, software licensing policies applied by suppliers
According to them, the real problem limiting interoperability in the cloud would rather be linked to the software licensing policies applied by suppliers, in particular Microsoft which is accused by its competitors of artificially inflating the prices of customers who would like to use solutions other than those of its ecosystem to administer the data hosted on its Azure cloud.
This is also one of the subjects which is of particular interest to the European Commission as part of its investigation into Entra ID.