Multi-Cloud Orchestration: Microsoft Azure + AWS + GCP

Because consolidation is often the wrong answer. M&A inheritance, data sovereignty, talent retention, egress economics, and genuine best-of-breed workload fit make multi-cloud the right strategic choice for most regulated F500. Forced consolidation programs that ignore these realities run 18–36 months over schedule and frequently get cancelled mid-flight. The mature answer is Microsoft-anchored orchestration — keep workloads where they belong, govern them all through one Microsoft control plane.

Real. Microsoft Entra ID federates as the identity provider into AWS IAM Identity Center (formerly AWS SSO) and Google Cloud Identity using standards-based SAML and OIDC flows. Conditional Access, Privileged Identity Management, and Entra ID Governance access reviews apply at the federation layer. EPC Group has shipped this pattern in production for multiple F500 multi-cloud estates — including federal accounts using Entra Government and AWS GovCloud IAM Identity Center.

Microsoft Fabric Mirroring uses change-data-capture from the source system — Snowflake, Azure SQL DB, Cosmos DB, Databricks, Google BigQuery — and continuously syncs into OneLake as Delta tables. It is near real-time, read-only at the destination, and Microsoft-managed at the compute layer (no ETL pipeline to write or maintain). It is best thought of as managed CDC replication into a governed lake, not point-in-time copy. Power BI Direct Lake reads the mirrored Delta tables with sub-second latency.

Data residency is often a hard regulatory boundary — EU pharma trial data, US federal subcontract data, healthcare data in jurisdictions requiring in-country storage. Sometimes the regulator-approved provider in a region is GCP, sometimes AWS, sometimes Azure. Consolidation through a residency requirement is a compliance violation, not a strategy. EPC Group designs cloud selection at the workload level driven by the actual regulatory map, not by partner preference.

Probably not — at least not on day one. The first-90-days answer is almost always: federate Entra into their AWS IAM Identity Center, register their S3 and Snowflake into Purview, enroll Defender for Cloud on their EC2 fleet, and mirror their curated marts into OneLake so corporate analytics works. Then evaluate which workloads genuinely should migrate over 12–24 months — and which should stay on AWS forever. EPC Group has run this exact play across 216+ M&A engagements.

Cross-cloud FinOps starts with one dashboard — Azure + AWS + GCP spend, commitments, reservations, savings plans, and optimization queue in a single Power BI semantic model. EPC Group builds this on Fabric, sourcing Azure Cost Management, AWS Cost Explorer, and GCP Billing Export. Then the unglamorous work: rightsizing, commitment portfolio management, egress audit, idle resource elimination, and architecture changes that reduce cross-cloud egress (which is where most multi-cloud cost surprises actually live).

When the secondary cloud has fewer than ~15 workloads, no significant data gravity, no regulatory anchor, and the talent supporting it has already attrited. When the AWS or GCP environment was built as a side project nobody owns anymore. When consolidation aligns with a natural contract renewal or hardware refresh cycle. EPC Group says "consolidate" when the math says consolidate — and just as often says "do not consolidate" when the math says otherwise. Honest architecture is the product.

Many federal subcontractors are required to run both Azure Government (for Microsoft 365 GCC High, Office workloads, and CMMC Level 2 scope) and AWS GovCloud (for legacy mission systems or prime-contract-mandated AWS workloads). EPC Group designs Entra Government as the identity backbone, Purview Government as the catalog, Defender for Cloud Government across both postures, and Sentinel Government as the unified SIEM — all within the FedRAMP High and CMMC Level 2 control boundary. See the federal Microsoft consulting page for the full federal control mapping.