Microsoft’s Internal Azure Cost Optimization: Other Factors

Microsoft’s discussions of efforts to optimize the Azure spending of its internal IT group do not include several advantages the company has relative to its customers:

• Microsoft has access to Azure product teams, which substantially speeds support and hotfixes; furthermore, these teams typically encourage and assist internal Microsoft teams in “dogfooding” new offerings; this helps product teams improve offerings, but it likely gives internal Microsoft teams a streamlined support experience relative to external customers
• Microsoft has developers and architects with significant experience, skill, and inherent understanding of Azure, which can expedite planning and optimize designs
• Microsoft has business incentives to rapidly adopt new Azure technologies, so it may take riskier deployment approaches than external customers; furthermore, the company is not a multi-cloud customer (using Azure along with other vendor clouds, such as Amazon Web Services [AWS]), which is becoming a popular