Microsoft Toes AWS, Google Line on Data Outing

When the European Union went live with its new set of data protection laws in mid-February, we did expect Big Tech to have a few shivers. However, recent developments around what could be antitrust practices under the EDP Act, have resulted in the three big guns controlling the data cloud business announcing pro-customer moves within a week. 

While it was Google that set the ball in motion, AWS followed suit by rolling back a clause that required customers to pay for transferring their data to another provider, Google took high moral ground and even took pot-shots at its rivals. Now, it is the turn of Microsoft – the third of this triumvirate – to allow business customers to data out from Azure with no “egress fees”. 

Europe bares its fangs at Big Tech

Of course, all three players made their respective moves appear to be voluntary, but the fact remains that it was either a fear of EU laws, which has already engulfed big tech companies such as Apple. In a blog post, Microsoft said it supports “customer choice, including the choice to migrate your data away from Azure.” 

Later on in the same post, the company quietly acknowledged that the move aligns with stipulations set out in the new European Data Act that comes into force next year. It is designated to act against anti-competitive practices of big tech companies, one of which specifically calls out the egress fees charged by cloud providers to shift their data. 

Here’s what Google, Amazon said

“The complex web of licensing restrictions includes picking and choosing who their customers can work with and how; charging 5x the cost if customers decide to use certain competitors’ clouds; and limiting interoperability of must-have software with competitors’ cloud infrastructure. These and other restrictions have no technical basis and may impose a 300% cost increase to customers. In contrast, the cost for customers to migrate data out of a cloud provider is minimal,” is how Google had described its move. 

Amazon came up with this idea: “We believe in customer choice, including the choice to move your data out of AWS. The waiver on data transfer out to the internet charges also follows the direction set by the European Data Act and is available to everyone across the world. “Freedom of choice is not limited to data transfer rates. AWS also supports Fair Software Licensing Principles, which make it easy to use software with other IT providers of your choice,” it said while sharing another blog post link. 

Is Microsoft playing the fool here?

As readers would know, the nub of the problem is that while these companies allow free inflow of data into their clouds, they charge for moving it out to another provider, which is quite obviously anti-competitive. What’s more, they make it prohibitively expensive.  Now, the big-three have allowed customers to transfer 100GB of data out per month for free. 

However, some analysts have criticized Microsoft for the number of caveats that it appears to have included into the new system. So, customers wanting to shift need to cancel all their Azure subscriptions once the data is transferred before they qualify for a rebate on the exit fees. This means, adopting a multi-cloud ecosystem will become costly with this rule. 

So, an enterprise wanting to have a hybrid cloud approach, which is the flavour of the season amongst tech czars, will have to continue paying egress fees once they’ve used up their 100GB of monthly allowance. Looks like Microsoft is merely paying lip service to the EU’s regulations and the authorities there may still have to bare their fangs!