European-only alternative to Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure is the cloud most often defended with the words "but we already use Microsoft for everything." That defence does not survive a Schrems II analysis: Microsoft Corporation is a US company, every Azure subsidiary is US-controlled, and Microsoft has explicitly acknowledged in court (Microsoft Ireland, 2018) that it would comply with valid US legal process for data anywhere globally - which is precisely what the CLOUD Act later codified. The "Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty" and Bleu (Microsoft × Capgemini × Orange) initiatives are interesting but technology-licensed from a US parent. For genuine EU sovereignty, you exit. Below is the map.

United States EU-only replacement stack 14 services mapped
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Provider
Microsoft Azure
Headquarters
Redmond, WA
Jurisdiction
United States
Legal regime
CLOUD Act, FISA 702, EO 12333

"EU region" is not sovereignty. Four questions decide it.

Data residency tells you where the bits sit. Sovereignty tells you which legal system can compel access. The answer must hold on all four - or the stack is not sovereign.

Residency

Where is the data physically stored?

Not "in the cloud" - which datacenter, in which country, under which jurisdiction.

Subprocessors

Who else is in your data path?

Every vendor that touches the data: the CDN, the email relay, the error tracker, the analytics pipe.

Jurisdiction

Whose laws can compel disclosure?

A US-headquartered provider falls under FISA 702 and the CLOUD Act - even when the bits sit in Frankfurt.

Key custody

Who actually holds the encryption keys?

If the cloud provider holds both the data and the keys, the data is readable by them - regardless of any DPA.

Fails AWS · Azure · GCP · EU region

Fails on jurisdiction and key custody.

EU bits, US-headquartered parent, US subprocessors in the default path, provider-managed keys.

Passes Binadit managed stack

Passes on all four.

EU-hosted on EU-headquartered infrastructure. Zero US subprocessors in the default path. Customer-held or EU-KMS keys. Listed by name in your Article 28 DPA.

Why teams are exiting Microsoft Azure

Azure exits typically come from one of three triggers: a public-sector tender that explicitly excludes US-jurisdiction processors, a healthcare or financial services audit that flagged Microsoft 365 + Azure as a single concentration risk under DORA, or a CISO who calculated that the licence true-up costs and "free" Azure credits actually translate to vendor lock-in worth six figures. The Azure ecosystem has tighter coupling than AWS - Active Directory, Office 365, Defender, Sentinel are typically all in the mix - which makes the migration more invasive than its AWS equivalent. It is still doable; we have done it.

Microsoft Azure services and their EU-only equivalents

A migration is not "swap one box for another". The mapping below is what we run for clients leaving Microsoft Azure on Schrems II grounds - full EU jurisdiction, no US parent in the data path.

Azure Virtual Machines

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. KVM virtual machines on Debian or Ubuntu, provisioned with Terraform and configured with Ansible.
Engineering note
IaaS migration is straightforward; the Windows licensing chapter requires more thought (BYOL or move to Linux-where-possible).

Azure Blob Storage

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. MinIO or Ceph RGW, S3-compatible.
Engineering note
S3-compatible EU storage is the migration target; SDK changes are minimal.

Azure SQL Database

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. PostgreSQL or MySQL with Patroni for failover and pgBackRest for point-in-time recovery.
Engineering note
Schema porting from Azure SQL (T-SQL flavour) is the longest single task; tools like AWS SCT or pgloader help. Often a good moment to revisit ORM choices.

Azure Front Door / CDN

What we run instead
We implement and operate an EU CDN for you: Bunny.net or KeyCDN, with Nginx and Varnish caching at your origin.
Engineering note
A CDN is one of the few layers we do not run ourselves. We pick the EU provider, configure cache headers, purge strategy and origin shielding, and operate it as part of the managed service.

Azure DNS

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. PowerDNS or Knot, authoritative, DNSSEC signed.
Engineering note
Zones are exported and imported as standard zone files, so this is usually the least eventful part of a migration. Lower the TTLs a week ahead.

AKS (managed Kubernetes)

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Kubernetes on Debian or Talos, with Cilium networking and cert-manager for certificates.
Engineering note
Helm charts and YAML transfer cleanly; Azure-specific addons (Application Gateway Ingress, Azure CNI) need replacement with standard equivalents.

Azure Functions

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Knative or OpenFaaS on your Kubernetes cluster.
Engineering note
Most Azure Functions workloads fit a small EU Kubernetes cluster running Knative.

Azure Active Directory / Entra ID

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Keycloak or Authentik as the identity provider, with OIDC and SAML.
Engineering note
The hardest single migration. Plan for a 3-month parallel-run window. SSO integrations across SaaS need re-mapping.

Azure Service Bus / Event Grid

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. RabbitMQ, NATS, or Redis Streams, depending on delivery guarantees.
Engineering note
Managed queueing options in the EU sovereign space are limited; self-managed is standard.

Azure Monitor / Application Insights

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Prometheus, Grafana, Loki and Tempo, wired up with OpenTelemetry.
Engineering note
OpenTelemetry instrumentation makes the swap mechanical for application code.

Azure Cosmos DB

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. MongoDB replica sets, or PostgreSQL with JSONB where the document model is thinner than it looks.
Engineering note
No 1:1 replacement for global multi-region active-active; if your workload truly needs that pattern, the conversation is different.

Defender / Sentinel (security)

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Coraza or ModSecurity with the OWASP Core Rule Set, plus CrowdSec for behavioural blocking.
Engineering note
CrowdSec is FR-headquartered and increasingly competitive in the SIEM/IDS space.

Key Vault

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. HashiCorp Vault or Infisical, self-hosted, with automatic lease rotation.
Engineering note
Vault is the production-grade sovereign answer; we operate it for clients.

Microsoft 365 (email, Teams, OneDrive)

What we run instead
Binadit Managed Cloud Platform. Postfix with DKIM, SPF and DMARC, and Rspamd for filtering.
Engineering note
Often the harder political conversation than the infrastructure migration. Frequently kept on M365 with documented exposure rather than migrated.

How we migrate off Microsoft Azure

A typical mid-market migration runs in three phases. The numbers below assume a 6-10 person engineering team and a moderately complex application stack.

  1. Weeks 1-3

    Audit & ID-mapping

    Inventory Azure services, Entra ID dependencies, SSO integrations and licensing. The identity layer is the longest tail. Output: phased plan with the SSO migration scoped separately.

  2. Weeks 3-6

    Edge, monitoring, soft dependencies

    Replace Front Door, Azure DNS, App Insights and Blob Storage. Pre-stage EU compute and replicate database. Move CI/CD off Azure DevOps if applicable.

  3. Weeks 6-18

    Compute, DB, identity cutover

    AKS workloads to managed EU K8s. SQL Database to PostgreSQL with logical replication for live cutover. Identity migration with parallel-run; cut SSO over per application.

5-year TCO on Azure exits we have run: typically 25-45% cheaper, with the largest savings coming from licence true-up avoidance and bandwidth/egress. Bear in mind: if your team uses Microsoft 365 and is staying on it, the identity-layer migration only partially decouples - that decision belongs at board level.

Frequently asked questions

View all frequently asked questions

Does Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty solve the Schrems II problem?
It improves the documentation story but does not change the underlying jurisdiction: Microsoft Corporation remains the parent. For workloads where the analysis turns on parent-jurisdiction (i.e. most regulated workloads after Schrems II), it is not sufficient on its own.
What about Bleu?
Licensed sovereign offerings, where an EU entity operates US technology under licence, are pseudo-sovereign - operated by EU-headquartered entities under licence from a US technology partner. They can satisfy specific regulatory requirements (notably the French SecNumCloud certification for Bleu) but inherit a stack they cannot independently maintain. For most buyers, a clean EU-native stack is the architecturally simpler answer.
Can we leave Azure but keep Microsoft 365?
Yes, and many of our clients run that hybrid. The trade-off is that personal data flowing through M365 (email content, OneDrive files, Teams chat) remains under Microsoft processing. Document it in your DPA, apply supplementary measures (encryption at rest with EU-held keys for sensitive folders), and keep customer-data infrastructure on the sovereign stack.
How does this affect our Microsoft Enterprise Agreement?
Existing EAs typically have annual or multi-year terms; the migration target is to stop the next renewal or right-size it, not to break the current contract. Your account manager will offer concessions when they hear "we are evaluating sovereign alternatives." Use that.
Is Active Directory replaceable in practice?
Replaceable in stages. Keycloak handles OIDC/SAML/SCIM well; for Windows-domain authentication on physical desktops, Samba 4 with FreeIPA is the established open-source path. The transition typically runs alongside a "modern workplace" simplification - fewer per-app SSOs, more standard OIDC.
How long does an Azure exit take?
For a mid-size workload (50-200 VMs, 1-2 SQL DBs, AKS, Entra ID): 16-24 weeks elapsed time. With a managed-infrastructure partner driving the choreography: 10-16 weeks. The identity layer is the schedule risk, not the compute.

Plan your exit from Microsoft Azure.

30-minute scoping call. We map your stack against EU-only alternatives, estimate the migration effort, and tell you whether it is the right call.

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