End of 2018 Microsoft and T-Systems announced the end of the German azure cloud Azure in Germany. Both companies started in September 2016 to create an Azure environment Link that is managed by a local company only to specially serve those clients and workloads that could not migrated to regular Microsoft operated locations.

In order to ensure that any client data can not accessed by Microsoft, they decided to hand over any data operation to a local subsidiary. They have chosen Deutsche Telekom as a partner cause of their reputation in data protection and big enterprises IT operations on the local market.

Azure Germany was not connected to the whole azure Eco system but really completely disconnected as well from a network and management back-end perspective. Without knowing the details i assume a massive impact to the already used operation model of Microsoft for legacy Azure locations. I think the only other dedicated clouds are he US gov cloud and i assume a comparable situation in china. That comes at the cost of dedicated maintenance efforts, but seems to be worth a try cause the European market complained about data privacy these time. So both companies invested heavily to satisfy the local market with that great dedicated Azure location completely operated by a local subsidiary. From day one of the availability all hindering challenges for any enterprise to migrate their workload in cloud was answered by a perfect customer tailored solution.

But the venture was never successful and Microsoft never invested even enough resources to provide a comparable feature set to the German Azure Cloud.

If you now start to find out why, it seems that the local subsidiary T-Systems was not successful in selling the service. That is more or less the official statement. When thinking about that, i came to a different thesis.

For me IT SEEMS THAT DATA PROTECTION WAS AND IS NOT THE HINDERING CONCERN for enterprises. That was perfectly solved by Azure Germany. As we know the move to the cloud is not a native lift and shift effort but does require way more mindset and behavior change. Application landscapes have to be designed differently, processes have to be much faster and direct to make use of the saving potentials, innovation speed ingresses dramatically. All these, and many more topics, are challenges that are not tackled by most enterprises since they are massive. For me the wrecked Azure Germany Story proofed the whole German IT community lying about the impact and there malfunction transforming business, tools, mindset, methods and processes fast enough.

That is not naturally a problem cause there are no persons directly blamed (at least i hope ;-) ). But we as IT folk should definitely learn as well from these massive fail as we already do in our failure culture somewhere down in our machine room. Accept the reason and effect should help us to adjust our behavior and allow us to much more open start to work on what is really hindering us.

Thank you Microsoft and Deutsche Telekom, that learning was liberally sponsored by you!