Below is a brief summary of the analysis of the French government’s migration to sovereign IT, which I had the pleasure of presenting at the CoE-DSC’s Strategy Meeting on ‘Managing Cloud Sovereignty’.
I looked at how the French government has set itself the right ambitions and allocated the necessary resources, and what we in the Netherlands can learn from this.
The case is now well known: 2.5 million civil servants’ workstations are moving from a Windows environment to a Linux (Ubuntu/Debian) environment. This also involves a migration deeper into the stack: AI, databases, the virtualisation layer, hosting, etc.
How did they go about it?
Firstly, the decision was taken at the right level: in the Council of Ministers. They ensured there was a political decision and support at the highest level. This is important.
They then carried out a thorough proof of concept. DiNum (Direction Numérique, the Directorate for Digital Affairs leading the project) was the first to make the switch itself, in order to gain first-hand experience of everything they would encounter during the process.
They drew up a business case. Broadly speaking: current licence costs stand at €1.2 billion; the migration will cost around €800 million; and the annual savings once it is complete will be around €600 million per year. This allows you to explain why you are doing it and what the investment will deliver.
Tooling has been addressed across the entire stack. This includes, for example, migrating from VMware to Proxmox, as well as hosting (spread across three French providers)
Simon Besteman is an IndependentDigital Sovereignty expert and advisor. NSDC Nederlandse Soevereine Datacenter Coöperatie. Datacenter expert. Blogger, public speaker, consultant, trainer.
