France's digital sovereignty push is struggling to escape the Microsoft gravity well
Nextcloud rollout shows locally controlled storage is one thing; getting users off Office is quite another
Digital sovereignty loomed large at Nextcloud's annual summit in Munich last week, where Benoît Piédallu, National Project Manager of Shared Digital Services at the French Ministry of Education, injected a dose of reality into the debate.
Nextcloud is an open source storage and collaboration suite. France's Ministry of Education started initial work to adopt it in 2018, Piédallu said, with the COVID-19 pandemic turning up the urgency in 2020. In 2021, "we had this little incident with OVH, a little fire, which destroyed all our data," Piédallu noted dryly. The Ministry went all-in and signed contracts with Nextcloud in 2024.
The Ministry wants to provide its users with federated storage and account management. At the time of Piédallu's presentation, the Ministry has set up slightly more than 400,000 accounts, and hopes to...
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