Why most Microsoft partners cannot advise you on sovereignty
The conflict of interest is structural, not moral. It is not resolved by your counterpart's good faith, but by how the mandate is divided.
You ask your Microsoft partner the question: should this workload stay in Azure, or leave? They tell you it should stay. They may well be right. The trouble is that you have no way of knowing, because they would have given the same answer either way.
This is not an accusation. It is a description of the economic structure they work inside, and that structure is public. Microsoft's partner programme carries incentives tied to Azure consumption: designations, benefits and part of the compensation depend on the volume a partner puts through the platform. An adviser whose revenue grows with your cloud bill is not a neutral adviser on whether to shrink that bill.
The mirror: the sovereign host has the same problem
It would be convenient to conclude that you should simply ask a European operator instead. But the structure is identical, running the other way. A sovereign host who tells you to stay on Azure loses the sale. They will no more say it than a Microsoft partner will tell you to leave. You end up with two opposing views, equally sincere and equally uninformative.
An opinion whose conclusion you can predict before asking the question is not an opinion. It is a commercial position.
This is why the sovereignty question produces so many thick reports and so few decisions. Organisations collect views they know to be tilted, set them side by side, and end up deciding on something else — habit, the contract already in place, or whoever speaks loudest in committee.
What fixes this is not virtue
There is no adviser without an interest. There are mandates whose structure makes that interest visible and neutralises it. Three ways to do it, in ascending order of cost:
- Separate the advice from the delivery. The firm that makes the call is not the one that builds afterwards. It is clean, and it is expensive: you pay twice for someone to learn your context.
- Pay for advice at a fixed fee, never on volume. An architecture mandate at a fixed price, delivered even when the conclusion is to do nothing, removes the incentive mechanism without doubling the people involved.
- Hold both capabilities and say so. Someone able to build in Azure and to take you out of it has no side to defend. Their recommendation to stay carries weight precisely because they would lose less by telling you to leave.
The question to ask in the room
It fits in one sentence: “In what case would you tell me not to buy from you?” Someone with no prepared answer has never had to give one. Someone who names a specific case, with the criteria that led them there, is showing you their decision framework — and the framework, not the conclusion, is what you came for.
What this changes in practice
Most workloads have no reason to leave Azure. The discipline is knowing which ones do, and being able to document it. In almost every file we see, the boundary does not run between two vendors but through the middle of the system: some of it stays, some of it has to go, and the architectural work is putting that line in the right place and then building properly on both sides.
It is also why this is not settled by running a tender between a hyperscaler and a sovereign operator. It is not a vendor choice. It is an architectural decision, taken workload by workload, that must stand up in front of a regulator — in Quebec, section 17 of Law 25 already makes it a documentary obligation.
If your adviser cannot describe the case in which they would tell you not to buy from them, change the adviser or change the structure of the mandate. The rest is conversation.