The Estonian state is to analyze how viable it would be to reduce dependence on U.S. tech giants such as Microsoft, Google or Amazon for its software.
You first start with building a domestic cloud infrastructure. And mandating by law use of it for critical services.
Chew gum and walk at the same time.
Move to FOSS apps. Move away from proprietary SaaS to FOSS SaaS or even IaaS. Move to open standards (qcow vs vmdk, odt vs docx, etc). Move from proprietary OSs to FOSS ones.
The real limitation is, well budget to invest in administration and software development (which moves costs from OpEx to CapEx), and an “innovation budget” which the most amount of new things an orgs given domain experts can juggle at the same time.
That said if have the orgs move to SaaS Element, half self host, some stragglers bridge teams, outliers bridge XMPP, etc etc. It doesn’t matter it helps push the ball forward for all of the teams. If some move LibreOffice, some OnlyOffice, some just start forcing their Microsoft Office systems to save to OpenDocument formats, etc etc
All push the ball, every step liberates them a little more so they can more easily do more!
You can already deploy free/libre software to proprietary clouds, so that is not a blocker. What is missing is legislation preferring free/libre solutions to proprietary ones, and building up domestic workforce who can directly support them, rather than buying licenses for support of software downstream of open source projects from US vendors.
Cina does it, fat chance of EU being able to do a damn thing though. Particularly tiny, permanently subsidized demographically challenged countries like Estonia.
Right cloud migration to sovereignty to me is SaaS --> PaaS/FossApp --> IaaS/FOSSPaaS/FossApp --> HybridCloud(FOSS IaaS onPrem, shared FOSS PaaS in both) --> MultiCloud
Looks good to me. But without at least some borderline functional (e.g. Hetzner, StackIt) sovereign domestic cloud vendors you’ve still got all your eggs in one US-owned basket. Everybody knew that, but nobody cared until the rooster crowed.
I wonder if that open up job opportunities…
It surely would. And free up alot of budget to invest instead in local
Don’t let good be the enemy of perfect here. Most systems wont be replaced in a year but even with tiny steps you can reach a milestone. It is extremely important to reduce dependence on other states for the own state to function, especially if it is led by a nazi orange.
Good!
I ran the back of the napkin math on this for my org (US local government). Not really possible unless you’re just doing office work. Microsoft is so deeply ingrained in govtech that you can’t even shrink your footprint. That’s not even counting the political and cultural buy-in before you start the lift.
I found open standards were easier to push. You can, as an org, force Office to save as OpenDocument formats. Converting records takes some investment too though, but that one REALLY can show why it matters some times too. There are US laws that require documents be in those formats actually, for gov that is.
That also opens up the fringes/early adoptors to use FOSS apps if they can.
I said it before, but I’ll say it again. Every bit of liberation makes the next part easier. Even if it’s small.
Very expensive but possible… in 20 to 50 years… If most of the EU cooperates… So… No.
Nah. Most of the software is free, and there’s mature free open options for everything, now.
The expenses are in training and taking the time to talk through simpler processes, and political in making folks give up their favorite sacred cows.
Critical stuff should be moved pretty quick.
Sometimes a hard conversation has to happen about what is really “critical”, of course.
It would cost an amount of money, but it wouldn’t really be a hugely expensive undertaking nor would it take longer than 5 years tops if done with any level of competency. There are 8 American cities that each individually have a higher population than the country of Estonia. The administrative overhead isn’t very big to begin with.
