Microsoft follows AWS, Google in cutting cloud data egress costs

  • With Microsoft now dropping cloud migration fees, the big three have all dropped these type of egress fees

  • Commentators have said that this was all caused by regulatory pressure

  • But what about multi-cloud fees?

Surprise! Surprise! Microsoft has rapidly followed Google Cloud and AWS in ditching egress fees for customers that leave its platform. This means that the big three hyperscalers have all dropped egress fees.

Following on from AWS’ early March decision to ditch the charges, Microsoft is the latest to offer free cloud migration out of its Azure cloud platform. Microsoft announced the move on a company blog on March 13. “We support customer choice, including the choice to migrate your data away from Azure,” Redmond wrote.

“Egress fees are a major impediment to competition in the cloud,” commented Max von Thun, director of Europe and transatlantic partnerships at the Open Markets Institute on X (nee Twitter) when Google cut its fees. He noted that the fees would have never got the chop without “intense pressure” from regulators in Europe, the U.K. and the U.S.

Now Microsoft Azure and AWS have followed suit. Only Oracle Cloud still implements cloud migration data egress costs but offers advice on how to reduce them.

Akamai, meanwhile, noted in an email to Silverlinings that with with many enterprises now using multi-cloud platforms from the big cloud players the fees derived from cloud migration are small compared to other egress fees.

They are not changing any practices related to its egregious egress fees for customers who want to push data from their network to another cloud or CDN,” Akamai noted. “With multi-cloud being the state of play, cloud migration is pennies compared to lucrative egress pricing practices, and the industry is ripe for disruption.”

Stay tuned to see what happens next!