Part of a trend, but what made me an impression is that Atos helped in the transition. The old consulting companies would be more than happy to claw back some market share from the US cloud providers.
Has Nextcloud gotten to a point where it truly competes with Google Docs? Because every time I looked at it, it didnt look like it had feature parity. Being able to edit documents with others is one feature I want out of any alternatives that I can self-host.
Correct title would be "Austrian ministry replaces Microsoft with Atos".
I wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites, like the high quality ones Denmark or UK have, instead of just outsourcing everything government IT related to politically connected publicly traded consultancies like Atos, Kapsch or T-Systems, which just screams of corruption and cronyism, things Austrian politicians are well versed in.
This would a much better use for taxpayer money and valuable skill build-up of the nation's tech sector(that's severely lacking in Austria) if the government did its own IT development.
Plus, a lot more locals, especially with high moral values who care more about the state of their nation than just making a quick and easy buck, would find working for their government IT services more rewarding and giving a sense of ownership in their nations, versus working for those shady consultancies who are incentivized to milk the taxpayer dry and enrich the shareholders without caring about the quality of what they deliver because of their iron clad government contracts with little accountability which they got from buttering, wining and dining the right people in power, who then get hired as "consultants"(lobbyists) in those consultancies when their political careers are over to perpetuate this revolving door to the gravy train.
Whilst the UK has GDS most of our stuff is outsourced to consulting firms just like there, for example PA consulting and Accenture for home office stuff etc...
Why would you think the Austrian government is not doing its own IT development? There already is a company specifically for that: the Bundesrechenzentrum.
Good, but this needs to happen on a much larger scale. These are "just" 1200 employees, but throughout Europe there are hundreds of millions of people working with Microsoft services and they all need to be torn out and replaced.
>As for the reasoning behind this move, it was prompted by a risk analysis that showed foreign cloud services failed to meet the ministry's privacy requirements, particularly regarding GDPR compliance and the upcoming NIS2 directive.
This also shows that they did it for the wrong reasons. It really doesn't matter if Microsofts services are GDPR compliant or not.
MS Office and other MS Products are unnecessary bloat of features and luxury that are dumped on customer only to keep the competition away. MS is YAGNI.
Coming after the Austrian military ditched MS Office (365, Copilot, whatever it's called now) for LibreOffice [0]. Similar stuff going on in Denmark and to some extent in Germany [1]. Way to go!
I get the appeal of moving away from Microsoft, but in my experience, Nextcloud is extremely bloated even for personal self-hosting. I wonder how well it will scale in a government setup.
I think it's the other way around. I agree that NextCloud is overkill for personal use, but it does feature a ton of bell and whistles that become useful at larger scales.
I hope that they stick with it, and that the trend continues. I think that it would benefit the EU, and its citizens, to break free from Big Tech in general, and replace their services with open source alternatives, keeping it up with local IT teams. I think this furthers sovereignty and is also a benefit for the public.
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[ 19.0 ms ] story [ 2219 ms ] threadI wish Austria had domestic national IT development teams for national products/websites, like the high quality ones Denmark or UK have, instead of just outsourcing everything government IT related to politically connected publicly traded consultancies like Atos, Kapsch or T-Systems, which just screams of corruption and cronyism, things Austrian politicians are well versed in.
This would a much better use for taxpayer money and valuable skill build-up of the nation's tech sector(that's severely lacking in Austria) if the government did its own IT development.
Plus, a lot more locals, especially with high moral values who care more about the state of their nation than just making a quick and easy buck, would find working for their government IT services more rewarding and giving a sense of ownership in their nations, versus working for those shady consultancies who are incentivized to milk the taxpayer dry and enrich the shareholders without caring about the quality of what they deliver because of their iron clad government contracts with little accountability which they got from buttering, wining and dining the right people in power, who then get hired as "consultants"(lobbyists) in those consultancies when their political careers are over to perpetuate this revolving door to the gravy train.
>As for the reasoning behind this move, it was prompted by a risk analysis that showed foreign cloud services failed to meet the ministry's privacy requirements, particularly regarding GDPR compliance and the upcoming NIS2 directive.
This also shows that they did it for the wrong reasons. It really doesn't matter if Microsofts services are GDPR compliant or not.
[0] https://news.itsfoss.com/austrian-forces-ditch-microsoft-off...
[1] https://cybernews.com/tech/microsoft-why-germany-open-source...