Microsoft Announces price increases on back of Brexit

On 24th October this year Microsoft announced it was planning to raise its Enterprise Service prices by 13% and a whopping 22% for its Cloud Services in the UK from January 1st 2017.
This was blamed on the drop of sterling due to Britains decision to leave the European Union or Brexit as it is know.
This is the first Major IT supplier to announce this rise, but it is unlikely to be the last and we expect other key suppliers such as Oracle and IBM to follow suit. Blue Shells Technical Director Nigel Bazley said “it maybe time for business to consider the move to Linux and OpenOffice as an alternative to Microsofts Windows and Office based systems. The main point to be made here is that theses systems are mostly freeware and so are not going to hurt your business when the pound fluctuates help keeping your IT cost stable in these turbulent times.”
It might also be prudent if you are thinking of turning to the cloud, to conduct a detailed examination of your Cloud providers contract. Such questions that you may want to consider are:
Do I have the bandwidth and resilience in external network connections to my cloud provider and what is the cost ?
Is my cloud provider vulnerable to DDOS attacks, indeed have they ever suffered such an attack and if so how long was the outage?
Can I move my systems from one cloud provider to another easily ?
A sudden rise in Cloud provider charges means companies often look for an alternative supplier, but find they are unable to leave the current provider easily. Should you require to move your data to an alternative provider you frequently find all your data must be taken back in house before moving to your new cloud host.
All these questions are worth asking and it maybe time for companies to decide whether a more cost effective, stable and secure route would be migration to the Open source and Linux solutions. Its worth noting that France’s national police force, started moving their 90,000 desktops from Windows XP to Ubuntu in 2007 over concerns about the additional training costs of moving to Windows Vista, and following the success of Open Office roll-outs.  The force has saved about €50 million on software licensing between 2004 and 2008.