Microsoft’s wartime pact with the EU rings hollow – and could spell trouble for UK IT buyers

[Pelican Press 0]

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’s wartime pact with the EU rings hollow – and could spell trouble for *** IT buyers

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has moved to re-assure governments across the European Union (EU) that it will fight any move by President Trump to interrupt services, should relations between Brussels and Washington deteriorate further, causing the United States to make cloud services a gambling chit in a trade war. 

The company promised Europe it would “promptly and vigorously contest such a measure,” yet its overtures to EU customers should leave its governments confused, rather than assured.

Its tacit recognition that the much-vaunted

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EU Boundary might provide its European customers with little real protection from US interventions – despite taking over two years to implement – cannot be glossed over. 

The issue in play is not just that

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, being a US-headquartered ‘communication services provider’, is subject to many American laws that make transfers of data to them a complicated process. But that they might no longer be able to give guarantees of continuity of service if, for example, President Trump should wake up one morning and decide to order them to cease their EU operations.

This admission, coming on top of well documented

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global service outages and serial security compromises in recent years, will almost certainly stoke any fires of concern. 

Such a possibility might have seemed remote just a few months ago, but Trump’s recent search for effective levers to exert control over other countries as part of his “America First” initiative means that what was previously a low risk, with negligible likelihood but massive impact, is now much more likely and could perhaps even be proximate.

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president Brad Smith clearly agrees, as evidenced by his new comments about pre-emptive measures and offsets. 

Certainly, that is the view many readers will hold after Smith’s somewhat clumsily presented efforts to calm the cloud market that he admits drives 25% of

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’s global revenues, and is clearly important for him to protect.

Telling foreign leaders that

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is embarking on a crusade of change, as he repeatedly did, flies in the face of his attempts to thwart regulatory interventions regarding the software giant’s restrictive cloud licensing practices and grudging moves to unbundle its software from its operating system in the European Union.

They might also consider that previous positive approaches and engagements from

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, and even directly from Smith, have not prevented them from levelling blame at the EU when things go wrong. As the company did during the wholly EU-unrelated Crowdstrike-initiated global service outage.

At best, the historic relationship between

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and European leaders has been spasmodic, and it would be understandable if they take these new assurances with a huge pinch of salt.

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now plans to further address these new risks through the creation of a new EU board to manage its expanded datacentre estates in Europe, whilst ignoring that ‘branch-office’ management does not in fact change the nature of its US-centric operations, and nor can they prevent the effects of any Presidential diktat.

Time and again

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has attempted to address legitimate consumer and EU-member government concerns through measures that are presented as forward-thinking and positive, but have zero effective benefit when analysed.

For example, *** FOI disclosures made in June 2024 confirmed the long-held suspicion that

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is dependent on the ability to process data globally wherever they choose for both their Azure and

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365 cloud service families, and this – not layers of localised senior execs – is at the root of their problems.

Due to their global operating model any EU board managing datacentres will have no practical ability to technically or legally protect EU data from a US Government choosing to exert its entirely legitimate, if controversial, control over them and the European data they manage.

What should cause immediate concern for the *** is that these overtures to the EU do not consider the *** at all – because it lies entirely outside of the

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EU Data Boundary, and doesn’t appear to be included in these new promises either.

Should companies with a foot in both *** and Europe decide the protections offered up by

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are indeed effective they may therefore need to re-locate their data and workloads to benefit from them, and history suggests that where the work shifts, so invariably do the key jobs.

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, in any event, appears to feel that such efforts in the *** are unnecessary given the level of dependency the *** government already has on the Seattle tech giant, whether that be in the workings of the civil service, the NHS or national infrastructure.

A view that can only have been solidified by the key positions the government has given over to

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executives to effectively steer the ***’s national technology strategy.

This is what should be the attention-grabber for

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’s *** customers today; not that

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is making big commitments and high-profile promises to the EU, but that the tech giant no longer feels the need to do the same for its *** operations and, as a result, *** consumers and companies can expect to suffer as a result.

With their choices limited and their data access subject to the whims of foreign powers, with a government too dependent on

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to put up a fight.

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#Microsofts #wartime #pact #rings #hollow #spell #trouble #buyers

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