We've had a few internal discussions around what we would do if our MAC discount reduced or vanished, this would be a multimillion pound problem for us. As an aside there's also the risk of the US interference or denial of service. It prompted us to evaluate what an Azure exit would look like, what was the most difficult change and what practices we can do now to help.

Initial findings were rough, a large portion of the estate could not be replatformed without significant development effort.

I'm aware that not leaning into the cloud-native PaaS offerings or trying to be fully cloud native just ends up with IaaS, expense and overhead. We were keen to avoid losing these benefits.

Since the discussion we've updated our development standards to ensure that platform integrations are decoupled from the business logic and have introduced DAPR or open source APIs (e.g Mongo or AMQP) where it makes sense to and features permit so that database, messaging and other integrations are easier to change.…