And you didn’t even go into the network side of things, where Microsoft nearly forces you whitelist everything on the firewall, since they change like weekly, which IPs or URLs they want whitelisted, sometimes even going through third-party datacenters. And of course their documentation only gets irregular updates and can’t be easily parsed.

Yeah, that just doesn’t scale. Don’t get me wrong, what you do works and is good, but you (probably) don’t have an off site backup or 100TB of customer data, that is needed in 17 countries accessed by over 15.000 employees.

I’m not saying, that you need a public cloud provider for that, there are other companies, that do these kinds of things, but it is more comfortable and as with SAP no manager has ever been fired for proposing using Microsoft.