EU weighs restricting use of US cloud platforms to process government data
osnews.com
osnews.com
I am not even sure what could be done to change this. We have democratic elections, people managing the country are at least formally qualified but they sit in the central Venn diagram intersection above.
One of the reasons for the technical dependence is that huge gap between the ones who understand how to architecture the country or EU information systems, and the ones who make the decision.
It's not like suddenly your user base(national population) could double overnight and you need such levels of scalability.
And the answer is, only a very select gov clients have the $ and the skills to do it
On-prem is not expensive or complicated, people just make dumb choices. Any IT engineer with two years of experience can run a small on-prem data cluster.
Only for comedic effect.
Because no, they cannot. But feel free to try
Governments aren't scale-ups/unicorns to need the scalability and global availability of cloud, they're ossified known quantity entities with predictable userbases and traffic across a very specific geographical region. On-prem is perfect for that.
> In the fire, 384 battery packs were burnt, which took down 96 government systems. Whilst this is obviously still a huge loss, 95 of these had backups - but the G-drive system (government drive), used primarily by the Ministry of Personnel Management, did not.
> [...] reports estimate that 8 years worth of data was lost, and around 17% of central government officials are impacted
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-south-korean-gove...
Having your government infrastructure run in country and managed by your citizens seems like a good idea just in general. It helps to develop local skills and the people living in country have a better feel for the needs of the local people.
I am an American but this just seems like a good idea even if the current geopolitical situation was better.
But cloud offers flexibility and economies of scale (regardless of who's running it)
I can spin up a dedicated server within 24-48hours or a VM within minutes on OVH. Also there have been plenty of white papers written about how much more expensive AWS is when compared to Hetzner or OVH.
The big cloud providers are quite expensive and come with a lot of geopolitical risk/baggage. European governments have safer alternatives within their own borders.
Edit: it’s Lidl who launched a cloud service not Aldi
Skills can be hired and trained.
* clear out a supply closet, buy 12 new machines to put in it, and idle them for 97% of the year
* ask 12 employees to please deliver their computers to the supply closet on the last Friday of each month
* email Emmanuel Macron asking him to find another team who already cleared out their supply closet with spare cycles
Or do you just use the cloud and not have to solve an operational challenge every time you have a new idea? (The actual pre-cloud status quo was that most people simply couldn't implement any idea that would require more than 1 personal computer.)
How did Spotify manage at the beginning without the cloud? How did any other company?
In less tech-forward organizations, you usually just had "the server", and it was rude or even forbidden to just run programs on it on your own initiative. You had to coordinate which programs you wanted to run when. And you'd better make sure your program doesn't have a memory leak or something, because then nobody will be able to check their emails until the sysadmin fixes it.
They literally reject your emails. There is also nothing you can do if ms/google black lists you.
The only real solution for EU is to ban the operations of Google and Microsoft. China style. So that their ecosystem can breath again.
No, just wishes, more sketchy data brokers who claim they have the blacklists and prayers to the US monopolies.
And the question becomes why in 2026 should the EU bow to the wishes of US monopolies?
Anyone can build an email service. Anyone can build a “cloud”. Anyone can build a spreadsheet.
Good riddance.
There are so many ESPs that do not get rejected. Neither is it true that there isn't anything you can do if you end up on a blacklist.
That's not to say that it's trivial, but it's certainly doable.
Unfortunately, Drive and Voice are keeping me subscribed to their service despite me wanting VERY BADLY to exit it. Neither have good alternatives that check all the boxes.
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/object-storage-pro...
There are apps that can map them as a drive directly for your pc/mac/linux
On their iPhones with Apple IDs.
It needs the cooperation of member states to implement something like this. The EU cannot really force any large state to do anything - IIRC France broke EU rules on national debt or similar and nothing could be done.
Do people then null route all the CIDR blocks in the US and all US based CDN's? Has anyone been daring enough to try this yet? I predict DNS to be the first single point of success even assuming one uses a EU specific TLD for all domains.
Also they speak the language of their competitor, which deludes some into thinking that U.S. interests are the same as EU ones.
During the Schröder/Chirac era it wasn't as bad. Only the UK was completely captured under Blair (perhaps the common language played a role there, too).
Imperative to stop the data leak this month (Maj 2026).
What in the world let the EU countries into this situation.
The US serpent's propaganda that played the EU into being weaker and dependent until the US no longer needs us (you are here now) with the ultimate goal of extorting as much as possible on the way out. Shame on us for falling for it
Remember that Amazon used AWS to spy on other companies when they were trying to enter new markets. How f-g naive are you to think your information is safe just because you signed a contract?
We’re only 18months into realising and having clear evidence that the US is an untrustworthy partner and in fact actively hostile to European interests. Hopefully the process speeds up from here, now that we don’t need to pretend we can ever trust the US.
I agree that Hetzner isn’t it, they struggle at the object store step apparently, so it’s quite a long road ahead for them.
From my customer point of view, I think scaleway may be the most qualified but I’m not sure they can scale and step up.
They simply can't. It would have happened by now.
Now, if there was a market that were prohibited from using US cloud providers that would give EU providers an actual way to move upmarket.