The Dutch government has reversed course on a cloud migration that was already partly rolled out. In a letter to parliament, State Secretary for Finance Eelco Eerenberg announced that email and calendar services will move on-premises in 2027, with personal storage and collaboration functionalities following later in 2027 and 2028 via European open source alternatives. The decision comes after the independent Dutch Advisory Council on ICT Assessment recommended in June that the tax authority halt its Microsoft 365 rollout, which at that point had reached about 5,000 of the 47,500 employees across tax, customs, and benefits services.
The advisory board found that Microsoft 365 in the public cloud fell short on information security, information processing, and future-proofing. Specific concerns included sending confidential documents over American servers, reliance on standard Microsoft encryption rather than Double Key Encryption, and the fact that end-to-end encryption was not enabled by default for one-to-one Teams calls and was unavailable for group calls under the chosen configuration. The board also warned about vendor lock-in, reduced flexibility, and the lack of an exit strategy for moving to more sovereign alternatives.
Eerenberg wrote that increased datacenter capacity has made the on-premises option feasible and that the revised approach will reuse existing licenses where possible to limit additional investment. However, the reversal creates complications for records management, as some planned capabilities in the Microsoft 365 package are unavailable on-premises, and the administration is still assessing how to replace them.
The shift reflects broader European concerns about the CLOUD Act, which allows US authorities to compel disclosure of data held by American providers. Several European governments are exploring sovereign alternatives, though teething troubles have been reported. A Politico article quoted an unnamed European Commission staffer describing the Teams alternative supplied by Element as "absolute shit" on an internal message board. Element CEO Matthew Hodgson struck a more positive tone, telling The Register: "We've only had positive and constructive feedback from our actual customers; the leaders and IT functions that are driving sovereignty. There's inevitably a few unhappy change-resistant users in large deployments, but we work in lockstep with our customers to gather feedback and incorporate it."