Europe's Self Inflicted Cloud Crisis - Bert Hubert's writings
a day ago
- Governments and organizations have been convinced that only US-style clouds are viable, leading to a shift of critical data and services to US-controlled servers.
- Most European government software still runs on locally owned systems, proving that self-hosted or European-hosted solutions are feasible.
- Reliance on proprietary US cloud services (e.g., Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services) creates vendor lock-in, high costs, and exposes data to US surveillance laws.
- European providers offer basic computing services like servers, storage, and bandwidth, but lack comprehensive prefabricated cloud components.
- The solution involves relearning how to deploy services on European infrastructure, supporting initiatives like EuroStack, and enacting policies to prioritize local technologies.
- Many newer systems could be run on European servers at lower cost and with greater sovereignty, as shown by examples like the Dutch parliamentary monitoring system OpenTK.nl.