Europe's Public Institutions Are Quietly Ditching US Cloud Providers (theregister.com) 90
European public institutions are quietly migrating away from American cloud providers and office software, driven less by policy ambitions in Brussels than by the mundane legal reality that GDPR-mandated risk assessments keep flagging the US CLOUD Act as an unacceptable threat to citizen data.
Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism moved 1,200 employees to the open-source platform Nextcloud in four months. Germany's Schleswig-Holstein has already transitioned 24,000 of its 30,000 civil servants to LibreOffice, Nextcloud and Thunderbird. The International Criminal Court in The Hague announced in November 2025 that it would replace Microsoft office software after chief prosecutor Karim Khan was temporarily locked out of his Outlook account.
Competition economist Cristina Caffarra estimates that 90% of Europe's digital infrastructure is now controlled by non-European companies. Forrester predicts no European enterprise will fully abandon US hyperscalers in 2026, but these targeted migrations for sensitive government applications are already underway.
Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism moved 1,200 employees to the open-source platform Nextcloud in four months. Germany's Schleswig-Holstein has already transitioned 24,000 of its 30,000 civil servants to LibreOffice, Nextcloud and Thunderbird. The International Criminal Court in The Hague announced in November 2025 that it would replace Microsoft office software after chief prosecutor Karim Khan was temporarily locked out of his Outlook account.
Competition economist Cristina Caffarra estimates that 90% of Europe's digital infrastructure is now controlled by non-European companies. Forrester predicts no European enterprise will fully abandon US hyperscalers in 2026, but these targeted migrations for sensitive government applications are already underway.
Re:You know it sounds like somebody (Score:4, Insightful)
The US will not invade Europe and they know it. The only thing America hates more than Trade Imbalances is spending American military lives outside of the US.
Re:You know it sounds like somebody (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear Leader is talking about Greenland again. https://www.bbc.com/news/artic... [bbc.com]
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Dear Leader is talking about Greenland again. https://www.bbc.com/news/artic... [bbc.com]
Republicans will follow trump into a lot of things, but invading Greenland isn't one of them. Unless Trump can convince someone to gift it to him it's not going to happen.
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Bookmarking this comment.
Anschluss is expected. (Score:3)
Greenland will be glad of its liberation.
Re: Anschluss is expected. (Score:2, Insightful)
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Dear Leader is talking about Greenland again
Nothing to do with diverting attention from the Epstein shit show, absolutely not...
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See there's your problem - you listened to what the Liar says.
This is the same guy that said Tariffs were good.
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Last I checked, Greenland is part of Europe.
And Trump has been making statements that US needs Greenland. And has not taken invasion off the table as an option. (not to mention similar for Canada).
So, dont think that it is 100% sure that US will not invade Europe.
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Imagine him living in your head rent free, you poor sad fatarse incel.
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You would think Europe would have the good sense to stop America's democracy from collapsing? Why, when American citizens failed to have that good sense when they knowingly gave autocracy a super-majority in their last election. BTW, freedom doesn't come from a fairy
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Except the Republicans didn't actually get a SUPER majority. They got a slim majority and can't pass any legislation without the help of Senate Democrats. You can only use the reconciliation process a time or two per year and I think it has to be more focused on budget over social policies.
Now had the Republicans got 67 Senate seats, then sure, I would say they have a super majority.
Also, I highly doubt Trump even survives another three years. Even now, some Republicans are turning on him and the 2026 mid t
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I mean, we revolted against the crown because we didn't want to pay taxes to a country on the other side of the ocean. Then, less then 200 years later, we came and bailed out the entire continent during WWII. You would be speaking German if it wasn't for us.
But I get it. What have we done for you lately? Not all that much.
It's actually smart of ALL foreign governments to stop relying on another government's businesses to support your IT. That should all be done in house and I'm thrilled to see them jumping
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You would still be an colony from the UK.
Re: You know it sounds like somebody (Score:2)
You would think Europe would have the good sense to stop America's democracy from collapsing.
Thanks to the Tech bros, we're having a hard time stopping EU democracy from collapsing.
The EU controls zero percent of its main social media. The USA will as of next week control 100%, same as China and Russia. And while the EU isn't run by totalitarian assholes that need full control over the media to maintain their grip (like Trump with tiktok), we also don't need to be naive about the intentions of the criminals now running the show in Russia and the USA.
Social media is currently weaponized to support o
Beware the orange monster... (Score:3, Funny)
He is tariffying!
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You have Tariff Derangement Syndrome :-)
I'm sure diplomatic indigestion with the Orange One provides a lot of incentive to de-USA.
Transactionalism is simply not a long-term strategy.
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Let the EU use open source software and let them develop their own cloud infrastructure where necessary and possible.
Re:Good (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of people don't understand why I support Trump. His existence strengthens every other country and weakens the American stranglehold on the global economy.
And there's nothing mundane about acknowledging the legal reality that doing business with the US is a privacy and security risk.
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
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The US traditionally invades some Central or South American country at least once per administration. It's terrible, but it only seems strange because Obama and Trump I were the first in a long time that were too preoccupied bombing and occupying countries in other parts of the world. Invading Venezuela to, uh, liberate the natural resources, er, people, from a terrible CIA asset, uh, dictator, is pretty standard foreign policy.
Invading Greenland would be a very different thing. I hope the US congress reali
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Operation Just Cause was not "covert." We watched it on TV. Part of it involved blasting rock music so loud that it caused the defenders to surrender. Here's the playlist. [gwu.edu]
It wasn't even much different: the US invaded Panama to depose the dictator, Manuel Noriega, who was wanted on drug trafficking charges. Totally coincidentally he was a CIA asset who stopped being entirely loyal, and also the dictator of a country in possession of a resource critical to the US (the Panama canal).
Urgent Fury wasn't covert e
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Yes, it feels different because Clinton seemed to respect the law and got permission for his invasion of Haiti, Bush II got carte blanche due to 911, used it to invade Afghanistan with broad approval, then slipped in an illegal invastion of Iraq when everyone was still all rah rah. It was a pretty big idea when it came out that they were lying about the weapons of mass destruction. Then Obama just kept up the fait accompli. That was forty years without any proper overt American imperialism in the western he
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and the clear intent with Greenland, something that seemed impossible now seems quite possible
There's a massive difference between Venezuela and Greenland. I wouldn't go so far as say WW3 seems quite possible, just slightly less impossible. It is however quite possible that America once again gets involved in another regional and localised conflict.
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Been doing it for years. Nextcloud is a good example.
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How many customers in the EU still use AWS? Seems like plenty were at least as recently as the big AWS outage two months ago:
https://capacityglobal.com/new... [capacityglobal.com]
LOL (Score:4, Interesting)
On the left we have Google, Microsoft 365, and Azure.
On the right, we have NextCloud(a file sync/sharing server), Libre Office and Thunderbird(?). They could have at least used Evolution.
I'm unopposed to the use of U.S.-independent cloud services and SaaS platform(s). But the comparison being made here is the same as claiming equivalence between a fountain pen and a word processor.
Re: LOL (Score:4, Interesting)
Are authors better? Has a better book than [your favorite classic] been written because of word processing?
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No idea what Blue Trane is. I suspect that you're being facetious. But, I think you'll agree that any response to that question would be a subjective opinion.
It seems possible, though unlikely, that Shakespeare would have written much of consequence had he needed to carve it into stone. So, I'd say that the writing instrument was at least an enabler for him. Though it certainly did not create him or his ideas. It simply allowed him to more easily express his ideas and teh printing press allowed him to disse
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I do that too sometimes, to make people think... but in BT's case, it gets irritating when someone won't own up to their own ideas by couching them in ambiguity.
Sorry BT, up your game or take the heat.
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Let me pull a BlueTrane on you . Did writing improve since fountain pens ?
Are authors better? Has a better book than [your favorite classic] been written because of word processing?
While I agree with your "one person blaming the tool is stupid" comment, that's not what "groupware" is about. The question isn't if authors are better or a book is better written. It's a question of whether a large document written and reviewed by a committee of multiple publishers was produced and processed faster or not. The words will be the same whether we email a file back and forth with increasingly long filenames Important-Doc-Rev2.5a-CDComments-BAApproved-LegalReviewed.odf or whether it was accesse
Re: LOL (Score:2)
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I got that email in 2006. I think they forgot to append their initials.
True. Collaboration is easier with such tools. There's no doubt.
Just saying, people, younger people who were born into "there's an App for that", and MBA's, of course, blind
Re: LOL (Score:2)
For 100 years at least it hasn't been a question of better, but a question of "more productive".
Hence the global enshittification.
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Are authors better? Has a better book than [your favorite classic] been written because of word processing?
Yes, my books.
Maybe not better by literary standards, but better for me. I would have never published anything if word processing didn't exist. I know that for a fact, because my very first manuscript, which I wrote by hand in three notebooks, is still unpublished. 25 years after I wrote it.
It's not the writing per se that's easier, but the editing. And a book takes a lot of editing before it's done.
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Sure but presumably that's also because our first manuscript is your least good work. While there are exceptions, people usually improve in their art with more practice.
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Well, yes.
I'm still editing that first manuscript after copying everything into a digital file. Yes, it takes quite a bit of editing. :-)
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Of all the word processors I've used the best was MSWord 5.2a for the Mac LC2 & LC3. LibreOffice Writer comes close. Nothing since from MS that I've used comes close.
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Of all the word processors I've used the best was MSWord 5.2a for the Mac LC2 & LC3. LibreOffice Writer comes close. Nothing since from MS that I've used comes close.
The most perfect word processor was WordPerfect 5.1. For DOS. Nothing else comes close.
Re: LOL (Score:2)
Winword.exe 2.0 was and still is better. It did also needed Windows, but win 3.11 was already good enough.
It all went into the drain when people started installing trumpet winsock and then that pos, netscape, over the nsca mosaic.
And we stopped having snow in winter.
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I'd say MS Word 3.0 on a Mac SE/30 was pretty good. Just basic responsiveness to keystrokes. It also fit on an 800k floppy with room to spare. The ironic thing is that there have not been many features added to Word since the 3.0/4.0 days that we use all the time.
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That is just FUD.
Air gapped cloud (Score:2)
I'd expect that companies and institutions to start buying on-site cloud in a shipping container soon due to the risks of running on that small number of global cloud providers.
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I'd expect that companies and institutions to start buying on-site cloud in a shipping container soon due to the risks of running on that small number of global cloud providers.
No need, plenty of local telcos, Think Telefonica (spain) and destuches Telekom (germany) and local companies offering cloud services (mostly OpenStack, with a dash of XenCloud, vmWARE Cloud and Azure) within the EU.
The real problem is the underlying infrastructure. If you go vmWare and Azure those are american companies (and propiertary), and if you choose the wrong OpenStack or XenCloud distro, you end up beholden to a non-EU entity (say, PurpleHat, Huawei or Cannonical).
So, european public cloud provider
Agree (Score:2)
I'm thinking both cloud and all computers stored on-site so that data + equipment + network links never leave the company's buildings
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While I like the idea of all that, the capital investment up front will cause next quarter CEOs to balk at the idea. Your post makes sense in a long term thinking mode, which would be ideal but we all know most publicly traded companies can't think past next quarter.
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Maybe this is something organizations can step in with, perhaps city/state/local governments. All buy a data center in a shipping container... and even though it doesn't sound like much, it could have a bunch of Proxmox (or maybe OpenShift) racks, backend storage via Ceph or another solid protocol, a 100-250 gigE storage/backup/network fabric, and for backups, something like MinIO. Done right, all it takes is a bunch of Supermicros, perhaps with basic configurations for each role, so maintenance is not di
Forrester (Score:2)
Forrester predicts no European enterprise will fully abandon US hyperscalers in 2026
Holy fuck! Forrester guessed correctly for once. In other news; Fire hot. Water wet.
Of course they are (Score:5, Informative)
Any international company or foreign government that isn't currently working on a move away from US based computing/storage/OSes/Office suites is setting themselves up for failure. We've shown that we can't be trusted with their data.
More competition welcome (Score:5, Interesting)
I, for one, definitely welcome more competition. Nextcloud, LibreOffice and Thunderbird are good, but they require a lot of effort to switch.
On the other hand, business in Canada has been good. The place I work at has an influx of US organizations who do not want to host their data in the US either.
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We (Canada) need to wean ourselves off of dependence on US software and cloud providers. I've mostly de-Googled my life [skoll.ca] but companies and governments need to do something similar on a much larger scale.
There are already non-US cloud providers like OVH that have data centres in Canada; they should be getting our business.
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Yep. In theory OVH are already pre-approved, at least for Quebec government projects, but I'm not aware of any projects using them (not that I'd know, I work mostly with non-profits, but we have a few small municipal projects too). OVH account managers can be helpful in providing info for bidding on contracts, certifications, stuff like that.
Re:More competition welcome (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest burden was migrating some VBA Macros - which turned out to be a high value project anyway. We eliminated a heap of unprofessionally written code, removed dozens of bugs and standardised future macro development.
Overall, the switch was a positive budget project - which is pretty rare for something that is done for regulatory reasons.
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Canada is a country of 40 million. Of course we have data centres [datacentermap.com]. At least 88 just in Toronto.
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Nah. They melt the igloos.
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One would be surprised. Canada has a number of regions and AZs. One bonus with Canada is how relatively easy it is to cool data centers.
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ANY cloud provider is a bad place to store your data. I don't care what country it is. Cloud is just a marketing term for "someone else's server". Yeah no thanks.
Hope they choose Openstack providers using EU dist (Score:2)
JM2C YMMV
Hope them Europeans choose Openstack providers using EU distros. That way, they will no be beholden to the undelying Canonical, PurpleHat or Huawei/ZTE machinations.
Europe used to have many OpenStack distros, Including Suse OpenStack Cloud, and Nokia Cloud (formerly Alcatel Cloud). Nokia Cloud is dead, and I know of no other european OpenStack distros (will love to hear about them, though).
Also, I do not know of European Xen Cloud distros, and the underlying structure of vmWare and Azure are contro
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Do we need OpenStack? That is a heck of a lot of overhead. It might be that we may be better with a system better able to handle "pet" VMs like Proxmox or something that manages VMs on top of KVM.
I have worked on a number of OpenStack implementations. Too many man-hours to get it to work, and they get chucked for OpenShift, or even VMWare. If one needs Kubernetes, there are also solutions like Rancher as well.
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Do we need OpenStack? That is a heck of a lot of overhead. It might be that we may be better with a system better able to handle "pet" VMs like Proxmox or something that manages VMs on top of KVM.
I have worked on a number of OpenStack implementations. Too many man-hours to get it to work, and they get chucked for OpenShift, or even VMWare. If one needs Kubernetes, there are also solutions like Rancher as well.
If you can make a PUBLIC CLOUD using proxmox, go right ahead. AFAIK, so far, no one has (and a private cloud has not been done either).
Telcos are not hyperscalers (like AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM cloud or Oracle cloud), so the challenge is smaller, and yet they do not use ProxMox either.
Don't get me wrong, ProxMox is great for Virtualization, but Cloud is a whole different game, vistualization is but a small part of that puzzle...
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Agreed, completely different layers of scaling, but the cloud installation that is sitting in a shipping container at the town square may be able to do that.
Even the disk storage is completely different, but for these relatively small tasks, OpenShift may be good enough, or even static virtualization.
The key is getting this stuff decentralized.
A little rich (Score:3)
Coming from the group that gave us those annoying cookie popup dialogs! /s
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And in actual reality, what gave you those is the web developers. You can do most web things without tracking cookies.
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For the simple reason that I don't collect visitor data that requires it.
US has proved untrustworthy. (Score:3)
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Yes. And that cannot be fixed.
Also note that even before many regulated European enterprises needed an exit-strategy for any type of outsourcing, and that includes o365. So far, that often was the local versions. These do not really exist anymore. And the regulators will look a lot closer now.
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As it should be. The globalist mantra of buy everything from somewhere else only looks good from the tallest of ivory towers. Outside the university it's a race to the bottom.
All it takes is some successes (Score:2)
The story points out three that have excellent chances of being successful. After that, the landslide can begin.
It's about effing time. (Score:3)
Disclaimer: European here.
This nonsense has been going on for too long already. Going all EU GDPR with fanfare and then the authorities themselves go and host their stuff in the US cloud that couldn't give a rats ass about GDPR. Yeah, just effing great you effing dimwitts.
Gladly there are enough EU FOSS advocacy groups making noise and the politicians here are slowly catching on. Some good news at last.
This gives a new meaning... (Score:2)
This gives a new meaning to that old expression "Get your head out of the clouds..." American clouds that is.
--JoshK.
Ditch the US cloud (Score:2)
Ditch the EU cloud
The cloud is a trap
Run away
Not just public institutions (Score:2)
Several smaller companies I know of are doing the same and I am also considering it and discussing it with friends for my private purposes.
It is not just the political situation of having an unpredictable idiocracy in charge with CEOs of cloud providers having their heads in the arse of the malign narcissist leader of said idiocracy. It is not just that depending on any US megacorp for IT is a huge security risk. It is also the way how the legal situation in the US allows those companies to act in ways that
This is called making sense (Score:2)
In addition to increasing costs, why would any government give control of their data and computers to US multinationals?
Let's see, 47 didn't like the ICC, so he had M$ cut off all their M$ Office, etc, and shut them down for a short time. How stupid do you have to be to have that happen once, and not get out of their control?