A lot of organisations were already doing “cloud” before the big migrations to AWS and Azure started in the EU enterprise scene. Around the 2010 it became a much better business case to get into the local cloud, which is basically where we bought our own hardware and put it in rented rack space at local businesses which were specialised in running it, instead of having it in our own basements. This mostly didn’t scale beyond the national, or even regional, level but then that is still not a big issue for most organisations today.

Then came the move to AWS and Azure, again because the business case made sense. A big part of this was Microsoft being good at selling their products in a bundle, so that getting into Azure sort of just made sense because of how well the IT-operations side benefitted from moving into things like Azure AD (now Entra ID for whatever reason), Azure Automation instead of scheduled tasks and so on. If your IT-operations infrastructure is already largely in Azure then your development will also be in Azure because it’s going to be such a tiny blip on your Azure bill that nobody will ever notice.

With the price hikes, and also just how complicated it is to actually run and maintain IT-Operations in Azure (I can’t speak for AWS) we’re now in a world where more and more organisations here in Denmark are looking to get out of Azure/AWS to reduce cost, and many have already made the move.

Of course no one is leaving Office365, so many of us are mostly just trying to broker better deals with Microsoft.