France's Digital Sovereignty Push is Struggling to Escape the Microsoft Gravity Well
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Digital sovereignty loomed large at Nextcloud's annual summit in Munich last week, where Benoit Piedallu, National Project Manager of Shared Digital Services at the French Ministry of Education, injected a dose of reality into the debate.
Nextcloud is an open source storage and collaboration suite. France's Ministry of Education started initial work to adopt it in2018, Piedallu said, with the COVID-19 pandemic turning up the urgency in 2020. In 2021, "we had this little incident with OVH, a little fire, which destroyed all our data,"Piedallu noted dryly. The Ministry went all-in and signed contracts with Nextcloud in 2024.
The Ministry wants to provide its users with federated storage and account management. At the time of Piedallu's presentation, the Ministry has set up slightly more than 400,000 accounts, and hopes to eventually reach 1.2 million users. Each account could be allocated 100 GB of storage (a potential 120 PB), although Piedallu said the average storage consumption currently sits at around 3 GB per account. So far, 80,000 sync clients have been persistently connected.
However, it has not all been plain sailing, despite recent pledgesfrom the French government about shifting away from American tools and reducing France's dependence on non-European technology.
Digital sovereignty means different things to different people. Right now, this project does not include desktop applications. The users "use whatever they want on their desktop... Microsoft if they want,"Piedallu said.
"So we have some problems sometimes, and people are saying that it is not working, and we say, 'Yeah, so you just use different software'..."
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