How dependent are Belgian governments on American hyperscalers? The Leuven-based company BA, led by Jan Guldentops, conducted a study on behalf of the media company Apache, and the results are shocking.
Jan Guldentops writes on LinkedIn:
Email is our most important channel for sensitive data, but we have completely outsourced it to American cloud farmers. At virtually all levels of Belgian government, the lion’s share of email systems are with Microsoft.
Dependence varies from 73% in Walloon municipalities to a staggering 99% in Flanders.
In the whole of Flanders, there is exactly one Gallic village that is resisting: the town and OCMW (public social welfare centre) of Veurne. They still run their own email server and have not switched to O365.
A market share of over 70% is a de facto monopoly. Yet we persist in our anger. Municipalities are now even being encouraged to transfer even more data to SharePoint and OneDrive.
The bill will inevitably follow. In July, licences will increase again by 10% to 33%. That is no longer an inflation adjustment, it is a colonial tax. 250 years ago, tea entered the port of Boston for less.
In terms of websites, it’s not too bad, although the Flemish government and the Walloon municipalities are already halfway there with US hosting or US content delivery networks such as Cloudflare or Akamai Technologies (CDNs).
Finally, for all of you, I say TINA (There Is No Alternative). There are loads of European Cloud and self-hosted alternatives, we are just too lazy to want to see them. In my opinion, the days of ‘Nobody ever gets fired for buying Microsoft’ are over.
The study was made possible in part by the CYSSME project and the accompanying European subsidy. It used the Internet Security Demographics System, software developed within the CYSSME project (https://www.cyssme.eu) which, with European support, helps SMEs to secure themselves free of charge. Although this system was primarily designed to analyse the security status of European companies, with a few adjustments it is the perfect yardstick for digital sovereignty. If you would like to take the test yourself: https://ba.be/2-the-bad/sovereigntyinspector/
