As the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end. So, too, did Microsoft decide to pull the plug on crypto mining on its cloud services. From now on, Microsoft Azure users will not be allowed to use it for the purpose of cryptocurrency mining without obtaining written pre-approval from the company beforehand.
An attempt to improve upon the stability of Microsoft Cloud Services
The decision came from Microsoft headquarters in an effort to increase the stability of the company’s cloud offerings. Due to this, certain restrictions regarding what you can and cannot use them for are now coming into effect. As the company’s representatives stated, banning crypto mining on their servers is in the best interest of their clientele whom they want to protect.
The new cloud crypto mining ban officially came into effect with the license terms update of Microsoft Online Services. Examining the updated acceptable use policy reveals the company’s rather clear stance on crypto mining, which it depicts as prohibited without prior Microsoft approval. In fact, the approval must specifically be in written form.
Microsoft wants to protect their customers
Further elaborating on their decision, Microsoft officials emphasized the importance of wanting to protect their customers from risks such as unauthorized access to their resources as well as cyber fraud. Furthermore, this is a change they felt they had to impose to mitigate the risk of having their Microsoft Cloud services be impaired or disrupted.
As clear and decisive as their decision to ban crypto mining may be, there is also the matter of user intent. Namely, the company may be willing to make an exception for the miners who are doing it for testing, security, and research purposes. The question, of course, is how one may prove such intent, as merely stating it as such is unlikely to suffice.
The end of the line for official cloud crypto mining support
Microsoft Online Services is a product of the company’s software as a service strategy. One of the puzzle pieces includes Microsoft Azure, a service that used to cover crypto mining as part of its certain subscription types. At some point in time, Microsoft was also playing around with the notion of letting their cloud services be used to power blockchain services, but that idea has since been abandoned.
Allegedly, Microsoft cloud computing services have been bogged down by capacity shortages in recent years, and continuing supply-chain limitations is the reason. The prolonged effects of this will likely continue to be felt for at least a while.
Cloud computing services are increasingly revoking their crypto mining support.
The global industry trends are moving in the anti-cloud-mining direction
Comparatively speaking, Microsoft’s decision to ban crypto mining does not deviate from the global trend too much. In fact, numerous cloud service providers, including the likes of Google, are also deciding to revoke their mining support. Similarly to Microsoft, Google also requires you to obtain pre-written approval beforehand if you intend to use their services for similar purposes. Digital ocean adopted the same measures, while Oracle has decided to plan a ban on crypto mining without pardon.
There are many other ways to earn with cryptocurrencies without relying on investments alone, and crypto mining is one of them. Granted, it still requires expensive hardware and there are electricity costs associated with running it, but other than that, it’s a passive income generator. To circumvent these drawbacks, an increasing amount of users started moving their crypto mining operations to the cloud, but these times are now a thing of the past.
Now that we’ve long entered the crypto winter phase, this news comes as another bump in the road for crypto enthusiasts. Perhaps it’s also a wake-up sign to start expanding your horizons and learn about other crypto opportunities: