Microsoft was a latecomer to the cloud and has had to work hard to catch up with competitors who threaten to eat into its traditional enterprise market.
Signs are that the effort is working. Analyst firm Synergy Research notes Azure is growing at a blistering pace - as is Google Cloud - but remains dwarfed by the behemoth in the market, Amazon Web Services, which holds over 30 percent share.
According to Brad Anderson, Microsoft's corporate vice president of its enterprise client and mobility division, cloud enables organisations to choose between becoming a disruptor or becoming disrupted - and this applies to Microsoft too.
"This transition to the cloud, and mobility, is a challenge for us too," Anderson, in Australia for Microsoft's annual Ignite 2015 conference, said.
"We've had to change part of our culture, we've had to change our tools, change our engineering, but now, our public cloud annual revenue has hit US$8 billion."
Part of the reason behind Azure's appeal is that the Microsoft cloud has had to come to the customers, not the other way round - such as setting up data centres in Australia.
Microsoft needed a facility in Australia to provide local customers with the performance they were after, Anderson said.
"Definitely, that's why we have to have an Azure data centre in Australia," Anderson said.
For other parts of the world, being close to a data centre is less important.
"The way the speed of light works, you need to be approximately within 800 miles (1290 kilometres) proximity of a data centre to get all the performance you need," Anderson said.
"A customer in Germany getting capacity from Amsterdam or Ireland, that's plenty fast."
But it's not just other vendors that Microsoft is grappling with: cloud customers are now starting to rebel against provider lock-in.
In October, United States retail giant Wal-Mart open sourced its OneOps e-commerce platform to counter the "Hotel California" effect, where customers can check out but never leave their cloud provider, due to proprietary application programming interfaces, architectures and tools that prevent migration.
Even long-time Amazon Web Services poster child Netflix has begun looking at cloud independence.
Netflix released its open source Spinnaker continous delivery platform this week. Spinnaker allows companies to release software to multiple, different clouds, including Google and Microsoft as well as AWS.
Anderson acknowledged the desire not to be locked in and said Microsoft was willing to accommodate it, even if it means the customer won't be on Azure.
"We understand that customers will operate their own infrastructure, and use service provider-hosted capacity and have designed our clouds to be interoperable with them" Anderson said.
"What that means for customers is that they don't get locked into a cloud.
"Customers can build modern applications that can run on our cloud, or on their own cloud, or other public clouds."
To that extent, Microsoft will support the customers' choice of coding frameworks from other sources than their own, be it Java or Python or similar, and open source platforms.
Anderson pointed to the recent hybrid cloud pact with Linux enterprise vendor Red Hat as an example of Microsoft's willingness to accept that customers want options.
"It's all about choice," Anderson said - a stark contrast from the Microsoft of years past.
Juha Saarinen travelled to Ignite 2015 as a guest of Microsoft.
