Most Saudi companies with an Azure subscription do not need to leave Microsoft. They need to stop paying cloud-platform rates for a website, two Linux servers and a backup. This page goes through a typical invoice line by line and says which lines can become a fixed cost in riyals — and which should not move.
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Identity, Teams, SharePoint and Windows stay with Microsoft. We say so up front.
An engineering consultancy in Al Khobar signs up for Microsoft 365. It is the right decision: the staff live in Outlook, Teams and Excel. A year later the Microsoft partner suggests putting the company website on Azure as well, since the account already exists. Then the document-control system, which happens to run on Linux. Then a recovery vault for the file server. Each step is reasonable. None of them has anything to do with why the company chose Microsoft.
By the third year there is a subscription nobody fully understands, a finance manager who cannot forecast it, and an IT manager who is asked every quarter why it went up. The answer is rarely waste. It is that general-purpose infrastructure, bought by the meter, has been used for jobs that have a simple fixed price elsewhere.
The exercise below takes an hour. Export last month's invoice with its meter categories and put each line into one of three groups.
| Line on the invoice | Group | What it becomes on Skyline |
|---|---|---|
| Virtual machine, Linux, plus its managed disk and public IP | Can move | One Riyadh server at a fixed price; disk and address are part of the plan. 99 to 749 SAR a month |
| App Service plan running a company website or WordPress | Can move | Web hosting at 49, 119 or 199 SAR a month with free SSL and nightly backups kept 30 days |
| Recovery Services vault protecting files and folders | Can move | Skyline Backup at 300 SAR per TB a month; also covers OneDrive and SharePoint libraries |
| DNS zones | Can move | DNS hosting in the Skyline console |
| Bandwidth, snapshots and small storage lines attached to the items above | Disappears | These belong to the resources that moved |
| Exchange Online-only mailboxes for staff who use nothing else | Could move | Hosted mailboxes at 17, 23 or 45 SAR. Only worth it for people who genuinely use mail alone |
| Microsoft 365 suite licences, Entra ID, Intune, Defender | Stays | No equivalent, and no reason to disturb them |
| Windows Server VMs, Azure Virtual Desktop, SQL Server and SQL Managed Instance | Stays | Skyline is Linux only, with no managed database |
| Blob storage used by applications, AKS, Functions, Logic Apps, Power Platform, Azure OpenAI | Stays | No equivalent on Skyline |
The "can move" group is usually a minority of the lines and a surprising share of the variable cost, because those are the lines billed by the hour, the gigabyte and the transaction.
Take the consultancy above. Its "can move" group is a website, a Linux document-control server with 4 cores and 16 GB of memory, and 2 TB of protected file-server and SharePoint data. We will not quote what those lines cost on Azure; you have the invoice in front of you, and it is the only reliable source. On Skyline they cost:
| Item | SAR / month |
|---|---|
| Dedicated web hosting plan for the company site | 119 |
| Riyadh 3 server: 4 vCPU, 16 GB memory, 160 GB disk | 379 |
| Backup, 2 TB reserved | 600 |
| Total excluding VAT | 1,098 |
| Total including 15% VAT | 1,262.70 |
That figure is the same in January and in August. It is deducted from a prepaid wallet held in riyals, so there is no card to reconcile and no exchange rate in the calculation, and each deduction generates a ZATCA Phase 2 e-invoice. Servers can be prepaid quarterly, half-yearly or yearly at the same monthly rate if your procurement process prefers a single purchase order. Compare the total with the sum of the matching lines on your invoice. If ours is not clearly lower, or the predictability is not worth anything to you, close this page; you have lost an hour. Every price used here is on the Skyline Cloud price list.
After the exercise most companies end up with a clean division of labour rather than a migration:
That last point deserves a sentence of its own. Keeping the backup of your Microsoft 365 data with a different provider from the one that hosts it is good practice whatever you decide about the rest. Skyline Backup connects to OneDrive and SharePoint with read-only consent from an administrator, never sees a password, and stores the copies in Saudi Arabia.
Deleting a virtual machine in Azure does not necessarily delete everything created with it. After the move, look through the resource groups for managed disks, public IP addresses, network interfaces, snapshots, recovery vaults and App Service plans that no longer have anything attached. Until they are removed they can continue to appear on the invoice, and the saving you calculated will not.
If your applications are built on Azure platform services, if you need Windows, SQL Server, several regions or availability zones, a managed Kubernetes service or enterprise-wide policy and audit tooling, Skyline is not a substitute and we will not pretend otherwise. Skyline is a Saudi company operating in one region, Riyadh, selling a short list of products at published prices with support in Arabic and English. It claims no certifications on this page; if your regulator or customer requires specific ones, ask any provider for them in writing. For teams on Amazon rather than Microsoft, the guide to moving a Linux application off AWS covers the developer's side of the same decision.
No. Skyline servers are offered with Linux images only: Ubuntu, Debian, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. A Windows Server virtual machine, a Remote Desktop host or anything that needs a Windows licence should stay on Azure or on your own hardware.
No. Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint and Intune stay exactly where they are. Moving a website, a Linux application server or the backup of your file server to Skyline does not touch identity. Skyline is not an identity provider and does not try to be one.
Yes, and it is the most common arrangement. Your MX and autodiscover records keep pointing at Microsoft; only the A or CNAME record for the website changes. The two do not interfere with each other.
If the application requires Microsoft SQL Server, leave it on Azure. Skyline has no managed database service and no Windows images. Applications that run on MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL can run those on a Skyline Linux server that you administer.
Yes, over a VPN that you configure, for example WireGuard or IPsec between the Skyline server and a gateway on the Azure side. Skyline does not sell a managed VPN gateway or a private circuit, so this is something your network engineer sets up and maintains.
Nothing is charged to a card after the fact. You add funds in riyals and the published monthly prices of the plans you chose are deducted from that balance. Spending is limited by what you have put in the wallet, not by what a meter recorded.
Not yet. Free credits are free; use them. The useful moment to look at alternatives is a few months before the credits end, when you can see what the workload really needs and price it as a fixed monthly cost.
Skyline support, in Arabic or English, covers the Skyline side: the console, servers being reachable, hosting, mailboxes, DNS and billing. Configuration of your Azure subscription and your own applications remains with your team or your Microsoft partner.
Sort the lines into the three groups, add up the first one, and compare it with the table above. Opening a Skyline account to check the console costs nothing and needs no card; the code SKY30 adds 50 SAR of wallet credit.
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No card to start. Your wallet opens with SAR 50 of credit using code SKY30.