Europe's executives need to skill up to solve our total US cloud dependency

Europe is experiencing a crisis of digital autonomy. Our dependence on US big tech has been growing for decades and is now nearly total, at a time when worries about our former ally are no longer theoretical. Might we, like the International Criminal Court in The Hague, find ourselves locked out of our own mailboxes if we say something that is upsetting to the US government?

This post was written in response to an article in the Financial Times. Despite the highly encouraging words on the FT website urging us to send in articles, this submission only received an automated reply. So then here in slightly adjusted form:

Upper management of most governments and companies in Europe are fundamentally non-technical, and make IT policy decisions based on input from consultants and industry-provided and -infused professionals. And these are telling them that the three big US cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google) are the only game in town.

This leads to curious statements like recently in the FT from the director of the Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium (CCB) that it is “currently impossible to store data fully in Europe because US companies dominate digital infrastructure [..] If I want my information 100 per cent in the EU, keep on dreaming”.

Yet, many of the excellent employees of CCB (whom I encounter at conferences) would be able to do that after only a single visit to a local computer store. Their director apparently does not know this.

The FT article otherwise makes some good points, by the way!

If one has taken as an axiom that only the big three US cloud service providers can do computing, it easily follows that Europe plays no role anymore.

Yet, this premise is not true - many large scale IT systems do not in fact run on special US cloud services. They run on local computers, computers that can be rented (or even bought) anywhere. Up until maybe five years ago, it was still highly controversial to marry tax systems to proprietary foreign cloud services, so we didn’t do it (back then).

The director of the CCB is not alone in not realizing what is (im)possible. Recently the Dutch government decided to move all documents and email from the tax agency to the Microsoft cloud because they saw no alternative. They admitted that this means our tax operations will now become vulnerable to sanctions, and that the US grants itself legal access to our data. Since Microsoft’s July admission in the French senate, we know that European data on Microsoft servers, even those physically in Europe, can be accessed by US agencies.

Until quite recently, companies and governments were able to control their own data on local servers. The IT people that did that have not vanished, they and their skills are still around. Top leadership, lacking technical expertise, however has allowed itself to become fully indoctrinated that nothing other than US clouds is acceptable or even possible.

A meeting of decision makers with, a rarity, some nerds in attendance

When confronted with these unacceptable realities, decision makers will often say they’ll look into changing this situation once a European place delivers exactly the functionality currently procured from the US. This could be a long wait since it is not easy to recreate the American experience without any customers, who admit they are only going to engage once parity has been achieved. And likely not then either - companies also find it nearly impossible to switch between US cloud service providers!

It is always a risk to get too deeply in bed with specific vendors, especially for unwieldy large systems. Luckily, it is also possible to base services on generic compute, storage and network capacity, something we have amply available in Europe. Cloud-based experts may say this is hard, but I run a popular parliamentary monitoring system entirely on a single non-cloud server. It hosts all parliamentary documents since 2008. If I can do this, governments could relearn to do it as well.

This would not only liberate us from US tech hegemony. Using non-proprietary technologies would also ensure we do not get tied to any specific proprietary cloud provider, which would then end up as a mandatory partner to run vital systems for the next few decades.

To get any progress, two things are needed. Leadership within enterprise and government needs to skill up and grasp the digital realities, and not only parrot wisdom from a consulting industry that itself fully believes only in US clouds. And secondly, with that newfound understanding, large scale IT operators should reengage with the generic IT capabilities that do exist in Europe, and that until a few years ago were able to run things like our tax agencies.

This is vital since if upper management continues to wait until Europe’s industry recreates the US offerings, while declaring nothing else is possble, Europe will indeed continue as a digital colony of the US. This at a time when the consequences of accepting such utter dependence could be terrible.

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