Estonia hedges its bets on US tech while going all-in on Microsoft

An Estonian government IT agency is trialling European alternatives to US software providers, even as it moves many of the country’s civil servants to a centrally-managed cloud computing service provided by Microsoft. Ergo Tars, the director of Riigi IT (RIT), told the country’s national broadcaster ERR that it has no plans to …

[elsergiovolador]

Dead on arrival

This should have been dead on arrival. Centralising civil servants onto Microsoft’s cloud while claiming “alternatives can be explored later” is just locking in dependence first and pretending it’s reversible.

The money argument is deliberately dishonest. Debating Linux training costs while ignoring jurisdiction is malpractice. Under the US Cloud Act, data held by US providers is legally accessible to US authorities, often without the customer ever being informed. That means Estonian state data is exposed to foreign intelligence by design, not by accident.

The security carve-out exposes the lie. Defence and foreign ministries stay off the cloud because the risk is real and well understood. Everyone else is moved anyway because the political class has decided that saying no to US vendors is harder than admitting the security consequences.

Sounds like not only the UK has its security services asleep at the wheel.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Dead on arrival

I'd guess he has some senior user bigwig jumping up and down shouting "I want it NOW!!!" (in Estonian, of course). So the user gets it now, then gets stuck with migration costs later. There's probably going to be a lot of that going on as the ship gets turned round.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: Dead on arrival

I guess there is no mechanism where the senior big wig would be told: are you five and stupid?

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Dead on arrival

The problem is not the telling so much as the being understood, the reasons for that being implicit in the message.

[DS999]

It was probably too late

To turn back, since Trump turning the US into an unreliable and risky partner is a relatively recent phenomena. Their migration to Microsoft cloud would have been started well before the orange pedo was elected.

At least if it is a fairly recent migration it is easier to re-migrate. It is when you've been on a platform for a long time and have a lot of external dependencies built in that it is bad. If they treat the "be ready to move off" seriously they would insure that they don't do anything with e.g. third party products or custom software that depends on the Microsoft solution to make a re-migration more complicated.

[elsergiovolador]

Re: It was probably too late

Not planning for the possibility of partner going rogue is reckless regardless.

[Paul Crawford]

Tars said an open source alternative ... would be unlikely to save much money given the need for support, user management, and staff education.

But most of those costs are short term to migrate and change practices, beyond that you have lower costs and freedom from MS rental fees being decided beyond your control.

But the commentard above points out the bigger cost is what happens if Trump has a fit one day and decides to pull USA services as a form of economic blackmail, then your open source migration costs are trivial compared to weeks of outages, forced migration, and loss of data/secrecy.

[FrogsAndChips]

Exactly. Plus, it is better to divert these costs to EU-based businesses rather than be Microsoft’s forever cash cow.

See Liam’s article today on the same topic (The EU runs on Microsoft).

[MrRtd]

Independence outweighs whatever saving may be had by using US tech that works hard at vendor-lock-in. Estonia, like most countries are acting rather foolishly relying on foreign tech for essential services.

[elsergiovolador]

It also enhances brain drain. If they turned to Open Source, they could have local businesses being paid to enhance the software with whatever functionality government needs. But I guess local business would not be in position to offer wine and steak to talk the requirements through.

[IGotOut]

Sigh...

...the cost of training etc etc....

Like the constant renaming and moving of MS components? The constant "upgrades" to Office? The dogshit consistency of On Prem Office Vs Cloud Office?

With the likes of Linux and Libre office, you "train" once and that's good for a decade or so.

[ecofeco]

Re: Sigh...

The constant changes to Azue/Entra/iTune? The never ending patch failures? Ever changing license agreements and sudden obsolescence of hardware because M$ says so?

Nope! No costs there!

Morons. The lot.

[Anonymous Coward]

It should not be considered free though

I hope that they throw a few Euros to the opensource developers.

Sure some projects will get a few million here or there through EU sponsorship.

But governments and companies hoping to save 400 Euros per workstation should be expected to push some of the savings back to the projects.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: It should not be considered free though

Actually, I don't want governments directly involved in the funding of open source projects, because that inevitably leads to picking winners. What we're starting to see is companies offering open source solutions as a paid service: this matches market pricing with development and maintenance costs. The German government is backing Opendesk but the services are provided by commercial companies. I think OpenXchange is probably key to large scale migration.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: It should not be considered free though

OTOH a government could pay to have some feature that it required added.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: It should not be considered free though

Sure, but this is best done as "just another customer" rather than the usual government procurement scheme where politicians come up with wishlists full of contradictions. Opendesk is funded by the German govenrment but aimed at local authorities: Schleswig-Holstein's switch last year got a few councils and deparments interested. If nothing else, demonstrating that it's possible to migrate from Exchange will have people interested because success sells Reminds me a bit of the early days of EnterpriseDB which made a pitch for migrating companies from Oracle to Postgres. Companies were very sceptical so they put a lot of effort into explaining what they could and could not do and how much it would cost.

Some, okay a few companies are waking up to the fact that they've been sold a pup with SaaS which keeps getting more expensive even though the decisions to choose it were based on stable prices.

[Denarius]

manglement strikes again

A few golf days, couple of expensive lunches and suddenly propriety software is so good. Just dont ask your IT staff for opinions. As for Trump, TDS. Yanks have snooped since 1950s. Given recent patch issues, a dominant vendor could not be considered "reliable" IMHO. What puzzles me is the fixed belief that communications are unbreakable and always available. Having once had to get a small office up when telcos, power grid, government radio networks were down for nearly 24 hours after a severe storm. The office PCs were unusable as after boot, no authentication worked, let alone applications as everything was on remote servers. Now those servers are "cloud" situation is even worse. I suspect the Russians will be appreciative if they choose to cross border in drive to recreate the Soviet Empire

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: manglement strikes again

What we're looking at here, however, is governments making choices. They're starting to realise that sanctions are the new replacement for gunboat diplomacy and removing the risk. When it's the minister who's making the policy decision on national security grounds anyone liable to influence by a golf day or whatever is going to be told to go back and come up with answers that meet the policy.

[Anonymous Coward]

With the introduction of their cloud office suite M365 we can no longer work offline and locally according to the team responsible for these products. Well, unless we move up to the 5500 kr/SEK/person/year license (times a few thousand employees, Swedish public sector). Only a few chosen will be offered the expensive license.

5500 SEK year to write a document on my computer.

Please remind me, how did this transition to their cloud product help use tax payer money in a more responsible manner? And how can "all in the US cloud all the time" be the more responsible way to handle Swedish public sector matters. Oh and we recently through out many hundreds of fully working PC:s because Microsoft decided that they couldn't make Win 11 work on them. Bullshit. But it's clear that bending over and taking all this is just how we want to deal with things.

[Charlie Clark]

The usual argument pushed in favour of these solutions are the costs to set up and run the infrastructure, which giving the amount of cheap labour that companies like Microsoft have access to, does make them very attractive. The argument money is spent is interesting but it goes against all ideas of working markets. But, a bit like the hidden costs of advertising, the costs of sovereignty are not discussed at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

What should happen is multiple public sector orgs collaborating on offering cloud services, like hosting Nextcloud and matrix services, for example. This is already happening in some places between the bigger organizations. But most regional government orgs and many communes still run lots of on premises IT to a varying degrees of success. Being heavily invested in US tech on premises too with VMWare and Microsoft, doesn't help.

But my hope is in the tremendous power that the EU public and private sector could be if we collaborated on just some of these essential IT services.

[Touwer]

Broader view

This IT manager seems to miss the capacity to take a broader view on the importance of technology in the government and sovreignty