Microsoft 365 Business Premium licenses went from $12.50 to $25 per user per month. Enterprise E3 licenses went from $25 to $50. This happened quietly. Most businesses grumbled and paid. The news barely covered it.
Now ask yourself: what would you do if they doubled again?
Not hypothetically. Concretely. If your monthly Microsoft bill went from $25 to $50 per user, could your business absorb that? Would you want to? Do you have any option other than paying?
For most businesses, the honest answer is: not really. Email, documents, collaboration, identity, security, backup. If all of it runs through Microsoft, the switching cost is so high that you will pay whatever they charge. Microsoft knows this. Broadcom knows this about VMware (their customers are seeing 10x increases). Every SaaS vendor with deep enough integration knows this.
This is vendor lock-in, and it is the most expensive IT risk that nobody talks about.
The back-out plan
At CTP, we design every architecture with a back-out plan. Not because we expect our clients to leave Microsoft. Most of them should not. Microsoft 365 is a strong platform. Teams is becoming a genuine application platform with a growing ecosystem of third-party tools. For many organizations, it is the right choice.
But "the right choice" is different from "the only choice." Having the ability to leave is the only real negotiating power you have on pricing. And having a plan for what happens if the platform fails, if pricing becomes unsustainable, or if a recession forces cost restructuring is basic business continuity.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
Your identity layer is independent. Okta or a standalone Entra ID configuration that works across Microsoft, Google, and every other cloud service you use. If you leave Microsoft, your logins do not break.
Your backup is cross-platform. Veeam backs up your Microsoft 365 environment and can restore it to Google Workspace or to on-premises infrastructure. Your data is portable, not trapped.
Your security monitoring is vendor-neutral. SumoLogic collects security data from Microsoft, from Google, from your CRM, from your internal network. Changing collaboration vendors does not mean rebuilding your security visibility.
Your information store is increasingly abstract. Industry standards for document formats are converging. The data inside Teams and SharePoint can be exported, migrated, and reconstituted in other platforms. It is not easy today, but it is getting easier, and the architectural choices you make now determine how hard it will be later.
This is not anti-Microsoft
We deploy Microsoft 365 for most of our clients. It is a good product. The point is not to avoid Microsoft. The point is to avoid a situation where a single vendor's pricing decision or platform failure becomes an existential event for your business.
The recession question
Here is a scenario that is not hypothetical. A recession hits. Your company needs to cut costs by 15 percent. Your CFO looks at every line item, including technology.
If your entire technology stack is Microsoft, your options are: reduce the number of users (layoffs), downgrade license tiers (which may sacrifice security features you need), or pay the full amount and cut elsewhere. There is no room to negotiate because there is no credible alternative. Microsoft knows you cannot leave without a multi-month migration project that you cannot afford during a downturn.
If your architecture uses multiple vendors, your options expand. You can reduce spending on specific layers independently. You can shift workloads from a more expensive service to a less expensive one. You can renegotiate with one vendor by credibly pointing to an alternative. And because your backup system (Veeam) can restore your data to a different platform, the threat of switching is real, not theoretical.
We are not predicting a recession. We are pointing out that planning for one is free, and not planning for one can be very expensive.
What the CIO is up against
Industry research consistently shows that technology spending as a percentage of revenue falls within a healthy range for each industry. When that percentage climbs too high, because of vendor price increases over which the company has no control, the CIO has to find room somewhere. Often that room comes from the development or innovation budget, which solves today's problem but creates tomorrow's.
A multi-vendor architecture gives the CIO room to manage costs without sacrificing capability. It turns technology spending from a fixed expense dictated by vendors into a managed budget with options. That distinction matters in good times. It matters much more in bad times.
Technology costs have doubled across the industry. If your architecture gives you no options, you will pay whatever is asked.
What vendor independence looks like operationally
In a vendor-independent architecture, your technology has natural seams where one service ends and another begins. These seams are deliberate. They are the points where you can swap one component for another without touching the rest.
Your identity (Okta) trusts your collaboration (Microsoft 365). If you changed collaboration to Google Workspace, Okta would trust that too. You would reconfigure the trust relationship, migrate the data using Veeam, and your users would log in the same way they always have. Their email address changes. Their login experience does not.
Your security monitoring (SumoLogic) collects data from Microsoft 365, from your internal network, from your other SaaS tools. If you added or changed a cloud service, SumoLogic would add a new data source. Your security visibility would not have a gap during the transition.
Your backup (Veeam) runs on a schedule, capturing everything. If you needed to restore to a different platform, the data is there in a portable format. The restore path is tested, not theoretical.
This is what we mean when we say "every component is a choice." Not that you should change components frequently. But that you could, if you needed to, without it being a crisis.