I would say it’s actually because they’re pushing customers to Office365 which they’re leveraging to get them using Azure. To be competitive they need Office365

I would say it’s actually because they’re pushing customers to Office365 which they’re leveraging to get them using Azure. To be competitive they need Office365. To use Office365 in an enterprise scenario you pretty much have to use Azure AD. And just like that you’re already an Azure customer and are already hosting sensitive data in their cloud. Why bother with AWS or GCP when your slow security approval process has already evaluated and approved Azure at the same time as Office365? Keeping the AD sync stuff under the Azure umbrella was a genius move really. Microsoft understands big enterprises along with their politics and slow processes.