"In March 2021, we confronted a serious reality: state sponsored threat actors were targeting on-premises Exchange servers."
That totally joke excuse to just say that they think that they can milk their users more with a saas business instead of selling permanent licenses.
Also I find it very funny that Microsoft use the security of on-premise as an excuse when you see how insecure was their own IT with most of the public exchange was probably vulnerable to leak multiple times and for a long time...
You cut the part of the paragraph that gives the actual context for the quote:
> In 2022, Microsoft said the next version of the server would turn up in the second half of 2025. It was originally planned for 2021, but Microsoft said: "Unfortunately, 2021 had other plans for Exchange Server. In March 2021, we confronted a serious reality: state sponsored threat actors were targeting on-premises Exchange servers."
They're not trying to use the incident as an excuse to push people off of Exchange, all they're saying is that the 2021 release was delayed because of the security incidents.
Here's what Microsoft actually said in the blog post (emphasis theirs) [0]:
> We will maintain the current support dates for Exchange Server 2013, Exchange Server 2016, and Exchange Server 2019; however, we plan to support the next version of Exchange Server beyond October 14, 2025. We are moving the next version of Exchange Server to our Modern Lifecycle Policy, which has no end of support dates. We plan on continuing to support Exchange Server as long as there is substantive market demand.
> Also I find it very funny that Microsoft use the security of on-premise as an excuse when you see how insecure was their own IT with most of the public exchange was probably vulnerable to leak multiple times and for a long time...
Azure is by far the worst public cloud in terms of security. It was so bad, the Bing homepage could be edited by any logged in user, and that's just one example.
Also I find it very funny that Microsoft use the security of on-premise as an excuse when you see how insecure was their own IT with most of the public exchange was probably vulnerable to leak multiple times and for a long time...