- Austria’s Ministry of Economy has migrated to a Nextcloud platform.
- It’s the latest move in a European trend to shift away from Big Tech.
- European governments and agencies want to control sensitive data.
Best investment in defense a European nation can do. In the event of war, the enemy will cut all trans atlantic cables, crippling any government and company that relies on cloud providers in America. Also keeps data safe.
They do have data centers in the EU.
The development is still controlled by the US.
There are not many European companies among the top linux kernel contributors.
The big problem with Big Tech is that nobody knows what they actually do with the data and what exactly the programs do. So it is very easy for the US to have back doors and use them to spy on European organizations. If they host the software, they also can shut them down. That is much much harder with self or locally hosted open source.
While I genuinely love to see this, I fear it will come crashing down. At some point the one, or both, of two things will happen. Either:
- A government’s private cloud will be hacked, and the argument will be that the security upkeep is too expensive and cause the lapse that allowed the breach.
- Similarly the cost argument, on its own, will rear its ugly head during some future budget crunch and popular thought amongst government leaders will sway back to the ever popular “private industry == efficiency & low cost.”
Hope it doesn’t happen, but history do often be a bitch like that.