Europe's Public Institutions Are Quietly Ditching US Cloud Providers (theregister.com)
- Reference: 0180446043
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/23/1843236/europes-public-institutions-are-quietly-ditching-us-cloud-providers
- Source link: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/22/europe_gets_serious_about_cutting/
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.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/22/europe_gets_serious_about_cutting/
Beware the orange monster... (Score:1)
He is tariffying!
Re: (Score:1)
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:4, Informative)
Let the EU use open source software and let them develop their own cloud infrastructure where necessary and possible.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed.
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: (Score:3)
A bit of a risk. WW3 would be pretty painful for everyone. And given his latest actions with VZ and the clear intent with Greenland, something that seemed impossible now seems quite possible. He is talking about a land invasion of VZ. And no one has pushed the panic button to stop him. If he gets away with it, is invading Greenland so out of the question? At what point does all hell break loose?
Re: (Score:2)
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
LOL (Score:2, 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)
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?
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
> 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.
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.
Re: (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.
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
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:4, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
We (Canada) need to wean ourselves off of dependence on US software and cloud providers. I've mostly [1]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.
[1] https://dianne.skoll.ca/writings/de-googling-my-life/
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2)
We found the switch from M$ Office to LibreOffice extremely easy.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Does Canada even have datacenters? I can't remember ever being offered Canada as a location when I provision a VPS and I've done a lot of times.
Re: (Score:2)
Canada is a country of 40 million. Of course we [1]have data centres [datacentermap.com]. At least 88 just in Toronto.
[1] https://www.datacentermap.com/canada/
Re: (Score:2)
Nah. They melt the igloos.
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
A little rich (Score:2)
Coming from the group that gave us those annoying cookie popup dialogs! /s
US has proved untrustworthy. (Score:2)
Countries all over are scrambling to reduce reliance on US trade.
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. [1]https://www.bbc.com/news/artic... [bbc.com]
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgmd132ge4o
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Well speaking as a brit - you did for our empire so turn arounds fair play,