Microsoft to enact new cloud outsourcing and hosting licensing changes which still don’t address core customer concerns

On August 29, Microsoft went public with promised cloud outsourcing and hosting changes which officials first outlined earlier this year. These changes, which will take effect on October 1, 2022, still don’t address some of the core customer and partner complaints which led to Microsoft revising its policies in these areas.

Microsoft introduced outsourcing restriction in 2019 that resulted in customers paying more to run Microsoft software in non-Microsoft cloud environments. Customers who had been using AWS and Google Cloud as dedicated hosts for running Windows Server and clients were affected directly, but some of them didn’t realize the extent of the impact until their contracts with Microsoft were up for renewal this year. Microsoft’s changes around its…