Microsoft has announced several upcoming changes that could impact your cloud bill, infrastructure plans, and cost optimization strategy. Here’s what’s changing and how to prepare before these updates affect your Azure spend.
End of Enterprise Agreement Volume Discounts
Starting November 1, 2025, Microsoft will remove tiered volume discounts for online/cloud services under Enterprise Agreement (EA) and Microsoft Products and Services Agreement (MPSA).
This means that regardless of organization spend, you will be paying list price or pay-as-you-go (PAYG) at renewal or when you add new service(s).
You can expect a 6-12% uplift in overall cloud costs, including Azure infrastructure and database services (e.g., Virtual Machines, App Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure SQL Database, and more). On-prem software and education/public sectors are not affected by this change.
How ProsperOps offsets lost discounts and maximizes savings
ProsperOps provides immediate savings with automated commitment management on Microsoft Azure. It optimizes for Virtual Machines, App Service, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and more, using Reservations and Savings Plans for Compute.
Our algorithms use sophisticated strategies to ensure consistent economic results and long-term commitment flexibility to drive the following outcomes:
- Immediate savings: Continuously optimize commitments to recapture savings that EA volume discounts used to deliver.
- Maximized flexibility: Adjust commitments to changes in usage without impacting savings. ProsperOps enables horizontal and vertical flexibility (i.e., commitments can horizontally shift across resource types and increase/decrease in value).
- Renewal leverage: ProsperOps syncs commitment expirations to EA renewals, so that you have more negotiating power when renewal time comes.
Costly Migrations Due To Azure Disk Encryption Retirement
Microsoft is retiring Azure Disk Encryption (ADE) by 2026. This means that you must migrate ADE workloads to Encryption at Host, and these migrations must finish by 2028.
Migrating these workloads requires spinning up new Virtual Machines and setting up cloud infrastructure, which requires additional resources and cost. Organizational priorities may also shift to dedicate more time and effort to these migrations.
How ProsperOps optimizes costs for workload migrations
ProsperOps achieves savings without impacting workload migrations by optimizing commitments, such as Reservations and Savings Plans for Compute. Engineering teams can focus on the technical aspects of the migration, while ProsperOps optimizes costs.
- Cost efficiency: ProsperOps’ strategies ensure maximized savings automatically, so that you can keep migrations within your cloud budget.
- Horizontal flexibility: Our algorithms enable commitments to shift horizontally to cover new Virtual Machines, so that you maintain engineering flexibility.
- Reduced effort: Without automation, managing commitments during migrations to optimize cost is incredibly complex. Let ProsperOps take care of the continuous usage monitoring and commitment management while engineering executes the move.
Act Now
Very soon, Microsoft’s removal of EA volume discounts and the ADE retirement will raise your cloud bill and increase operational load. Prepare for these changes before they hit your cloud budget and put automation in place, such as ProsperOps, so you can better control your costs.
- Size the cost impact of volume discounts: Understand how much costs will increase due to these changes. For example, focus on Azure compute-heavy services and know how much discount savings will be lost.
- Plan the economics of the ADE migration: Identify the subscriptions, regions, and workloads impacted by the retirement of ADE. Forecast migration costs and effect on your cloud budget.
- Leverage automation: FinOps automation solutions can help offset lost EA discounts and drive efficiency for costly ADE workload migrations.
Final Thoughts
Consider using ProsperOps to achieve immediate savings and maximized flexibility through automated commitment optimization. ProsperOps Autonomous Discount Management for Microsoft Azure continuously manages commitments to optimize your cloud costs, so that you can achieve world-class savings, even without EA volume discounts or negotiated rates.
Key features for our Microsoft Azure commitment management offering:
- Adaptively laddered commitments that distribute lock-in risk over time and increase flexibility
- Enhanced coverage optimization that maximizes savings for dynamic, cyclical workloads
- Intelligent Showback support for automatic reallocation of commitment costs and savings equitably across subscriptions
- Azure Marketplace integration and multi-currency support for streamlined procurement and billing
Your team stays focused on implementing Azure volume discount changes, workload migrations, and other priorities, while ProsperOps automates rate optimization without impacting engineering.
Get started with ProsperOps by scheduling a free Savings Analysis!
