Yeah we were hit hard by the cost projections. It really sucks. But HCI stack from MS remains even more expensive. We have decided to bring as much as we can in house and only put the workloads that have strict contractual uptime agreements on our VMware or HCI stack. The rest of the stuff goes on KVM or bare metal to save costs.
IMO if you are using a companies VPN then the larger the company, the more chance it’s data is being exfiltrated. Looking at you Nord.
If you know how to host your own then your risk goes dramatically down. Although for anonymity you should choose a cloud that you don’t need to give your personal info to. Good luck with that.
This is why criminals rely on hacked devices. No credit card needed.
If you are simply torrenting some media then no one is looking at you anyway. Pretty much any VPN or location would be fine for that.
Your security posture should relate to your risk.
Same, we use AWS, Azure and a third party VMware suite cloud. The VMware is superior by far IMO because I like to have full control of my systems and roll my own stuff. I think the big clouds make their money by saving time on dev ops. I come from a sys engineering background and transitioned to development so none of that stuff is very difficult. I’ve tried Linode, Hetzner, Digital ocean and a few more but I think VMware does all I need.
We take a cloud agnostic approach to systems development so we have flexibility. Our team is quite small and we use Manageengine for patching servers and Atera for patching users systems. We only use a few cloud native services like AWS event bridge, load balancers, S3, Lambda, Azure DNS, Azure storage, Azure App service. But if needed we could pull any one of those and move to an open source solution without too much fuss. The red tape comes from exec level and their appetite for risk. For some reason they think cloud is more stable than our own servers. But we had to move VMs off Azure because of instability!