De Nederlandsche Bank, the Dutch central bank and financial regulator, this week signed a contract with Schwarz Digits, the German parent company of Lidl, for cloud services. Not because it is cheaper. Not because the software is better. But because the bank concluded that its dependence on American technology companies had become too great a risk to ignore.<\/p>\n
That is a significant signal. And it is not an isolated one.<\/p>\n
In October last year, De Nederlandsche Bank and the Dutch financial markets authority jointly warned that the concentration of critical systems at a handful of American cloud providers posed systemic risks to the entire financial sector. Too many institutions relying on too few suppliers: a single outage at AWS, Azure or Google Cloud would not affect one organisation, but the whole system at once.<\/p>\n
The bank included itself among the institutions with excessive dependence, and has now acted on its own warning. Schwarz Digits is investing 11 billion euros in new European data centres, operates outside American jurisdiction, and has no investors chasing maximum returns. The same logic that drives every infrastructure decision Ownbase makes for its clients.<\/p>\n
Across Europe, the conversation is shifting. Governments, regulators and public institutions are waking up to what researchers and digital rights organisations have been saying for years: the dependence on American technology platforms is not just a privacy issue. It is a strategic and operational risk.<\/p>\n
Reijer Passchier, professor of digitalisation at the Open University of the Netherlands, put it plainly in a recent analysis: the dependence on American tech giants is the biggest security issue right now. His conclusion is sobering. Organisations are so deeply embedded in the Microsoft, Google and Amazon ecosystems that it is hard to know where to start pulling back.<\/p>\n
At the same time, the Dutch government struck a deal with STACKIT, a European cloud platform, for public sector use. The same week, it extended a contract with an IT supplier whose ownership is transferring to an American company. One step forward, one step sideways. Organisations that wait for governments to solve this for them may be waiting a long time.<\/p>\n
Both the Dutch Consumers’ Association and digital rights organisation Bits of Freedom have reviewed alternatives to the most widely used American platforms. For cloud storage replacing Google Drive and OneDrive, they recommend Nextcloud. For office software, OnlyOffice and LibreOffice are named alongside it.<\/p>\n
Those are precisely the two components at the core of what Ownbase delivers. Not because we invented them, but because they are the most mature open source solutions available for organisations that want to make a serious, sustainable move away from American infrastructure.<\/p>\n
You do not need to be a central bank to understand why this matters. The risks that financial regulators are now acting on apply to any organisation running critical business processes on American infrastructure: files, email, calendars, video calls, collaborative documents.<\/p>\n
The question is not whether you will eventually make the switch. The question is whether you do it on your own terms, or because you are forced to.<\/p>\n
Ownbase guides small and medium-sized organisations through that transition: from an honest assessment of what you currently use and what it costs, to a full migration to Nextcloud on European servers, with ongoing management included. Get in touch for a free 30-minute introductory call.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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