Microsoft’s forced unbundling of Teams in the EU is more than an antitrust event. It's a reminder that enterprises must carefully deconstruct how they build dependence on platforms that mix sensitive and non-sensitive workloads, especially those outside sovereign control. The key lesson: separating sensitive from public-facing communications, and sovereign from non-sovereign platforms, is now a strategic imperative.

Bundling Isn’t Neutral

In September 2025, the European Commission concluded its antitrust probe into Microsoft’s tying of Teams with Office 365. While Microsoft avoided fines, it was required to sell Office without Teams at discounted rates and to improve interoperability for a decade.

This outcome matters far beyond the EU. For years, licensing structures nudged or forced enterprises into adopting Teams, regardless of whether it met their needs for usability or security. Now, organizations have a real choice. They can select the collaboration platform that best aligns with their governance requirements, rather than accepting one dictated by bundled pricing.

With unbundling enforced, procurement teams can finally compare like-for-like options, split awards, and negotiate based on actual business needs. This moment is significant because it shifts collaboration decisions from a question of licensing convenience to a question of security, usability, and sovereignty.

When Bundles Become a Vector of Risk

The Nature of Enterprise Messaging as a Data Lake

Teams, Slack, and other messaging tools are often seen as casual communication channels. Yet, these collaborative tools hide a deeper truth: internal messaging, channels, file attachments, video chats together form an unstructured data lake of organizational secrets, governance decisions, legal dispute history, human resources topics, and highly valuable IP. What you often see as “just chat” is in fact the map of your organization’s internal state.

When you default to using collaboration tools that also manage external and public-facing functions (e.g. email and calendaring), you’re effectively pouring your organization’s most sensitive communications into the same vessel that lives at the bluntest edge of attack surfaces.

Why Bundling Sensitive Messaging with Email Is Dangerous

In most enterprises, public email is the first vector of compromise, via event-driven and supply chain phishing, credential theft, malicious attachments, and social engineering. If your collaboration tool hosting all your organizational secrets shares the same identity, credentials, session logic, or trust boundaries as email, then a compromise that begins in “less sensitive” workflows can escalate laterally into your most guarded spaces.

By bundling secure and insecure operations together, you weaken your ability to apply differentiated protection. There’s little room to lock down the sensitive slices hard while leaving weaker controls on general tasks.

Security incidents demonstrate the scale of risk. Disney’s 2024 Slack breach exposed over a terabyte of internal communication and files across thousands of channels. Slack has also acknowledged earlier problems, including token theft in 2022 and a bug that exposed hashed passwords between 2017 and 2022. Microsoft Teams has faced similar scrutiny, from critical vulnerabilities like CVE-2025-53783 to research showing how attackers could exploit external chat features.

Unbundling Secure from Insecure Communications

Inside the enterprise, not all communications are equal. Sensitive and regulated discussions—such as M&A activity, legal strategy, HR incidents, and executive planning—belong in what we might call a high-trust domain. Day-to-day team chat, project chatter, and informal brainstorming live in a low-trust domain.

The mistake many organizations make is running both on the same infrastructure—often bundled with broader productivity suites that are exposed to common attack vectors like phishing, token theft, and identity compromise.

The solution is straightforward: segregate sensitive communications onto a purpose-built secure platform.

This platform should operate independently of the general collaboration environment. That means:

• End-to-end encryption by default, ideally with forward secrecy and zero-knowledge architectures.
• No shared server-side processing with other enterprise workloads.
• Cross-device verification, cryptographic authentication, and independent identity management.

Even if the broader collaboration stack—like Teams or Slack—is compromised, this architectural separation ensures that the most sensitive threads are walled off. It's a critical layer of defense that isolates high-value communications from the blast radius of common breaches. It also serves as a ready-to-use out-of-band communications channel in the case of cyber-attack, ransomware incidents or other crises.

The Sovereignty Dimension to Unbundling

Data Residency Isn’t Enough

For EU institutions and companies, “hosting in Europe” is no longer a sufficient promise. Under U.S. law, most U.S.-based providers must comply with valid orders issued under the U.S. Cloud Act, regardless of whether the data physically resides overseas.

In sworn testimony before a French Senate inquiry in June 2025, Microsoft France’s legal director Anton Carniaux explicitly stated that he could not guarantee that data stored in EU datacenters would never be disclosed to U.S. authorities absent French government consent. (ppc.land)

That admission under oath crystallizes a critical fact: data sovereignty cannot be achieved by geography alone. Even with contractual safeguards and technical measures, the legal hierarchy of U.S. law overrules. (theregister.com).

Hence, EU-operated sovereign platforms—and truly independent stacks—not just hosted-in-EU ones—become essential for high-stakes environments.

Why Forced Unbundling of Teams Should Prompt Broader Strategic Decoupling

If antitrust pressure can force Microsoft to break apart Teams from Office, then shouldn’t forward-looking organizations ask: What else have we “bundled” into platforms that carry hidden risk?

• Email + identity + collaboration + storage + analytics = a single risk aggregate.
• Cloud infrastructure, identity, logging, compliance, and archival chains are often deeply interwoven.
• Vendors often tie locking components (e.g. security add-ons, compliance modules) to broader suites, thereby hiding costs and dependencies.

This is not to say that utilizing these bundled capabilities is wrong, but awareness and forward planning are essential to ensure that your organization has maximum resilience.

The EU’s intervention with Teams should inspire organizations to perform internal audits of bundling:

• Which high-sensitivity workloads rest on general-purpose platforms?
• Where does cross-dependency tie your compliance or security posture to non-sovereign vendors?
• If the vendor’s jurisdiction cannot legally reject a request (as Microsoft effectively admitted), can you migrate out?

Strategic Pathways to Sovereign Unbundling

Define a sovereignty baseline

For the most important systems, especially those that will carry your most sensitive data and communications, insist on platforms whose legal regime is anchored in EU (or home-country) jurisdiction, and whose governance cannot be overridden by foreign courts.

Modularize your stack

Carefully weigh using “all-in-one suites” unless every component meets sovereign-proof criteria. Find opportunities to use composable building blocks (identity, comms, storage, compute) that you can interpose or replace.

Adopt zero-trust and minimal trust by default

Don’t assume “inside the suite is safe.” Micro-segmentation, identity-bound tokens, just-in-time access, and continuous verification provide meaningful limits.

Plan escape routes

Always require exportability of data, open protocols, and portability. Don’t get locked into vendor-specific formats you can’t peel off later.

Prioritize migration of critical workloads first

Start by shifting the highest sensitivity zones (e.g. CISO, legal, executive) to sovereign-capable platforms. Use these as a proving ground before broader rollout.

Build Your Secure and Sovereign Collaboration Future

Microsoft’s forced unbundling of Teams is a narrow regulatory event. But the deeper lesson is structural: enterprises cannot afford to treat collaborative platforms as black boxes mixing trust domains. They must architect explicit separation for sensitive vs non-sensitive communications, and between sovereign vs. non-sovereign vendor ecosystems.

The stakes extend beyond feature wars. They touch your organization’s resilience in geopolitical upheaval, breach exposure, compliance integrity, and operational control. In Europe’s evolving regulatory and geopolitical landscape, defaulting to U.S.-jurisdictional platforms is no longer a benign choice—it carries real legal, technical, and cybersecurity fragility.

The future of enterprise collaboration in the EU must be built on modular, EU-controlled, and secure foundations. Unbundling isn’t just a legal remedy—it’s the architecture for the sovereign era.