France's digital sovereignty push is struggling to escape the Microsoft gravity well

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 eventually reach 1.2 million users. Each account could be allocated 100 GB of storage (a potential 120 PB), although Piédallu said the average storage consumption currently sits at around 3 GB per account. So far, 80,000 sync clients have been persistently connected.

However, it has not all been plain sailing, despite recent pledges from the French government about shifting away from American tools and reducing France's dependence on non-European technology.

Nobody should be able to switch off or shut down our services from the outside

Digital sovereignty means different things to different people. Right now, this project does not include desktop applications. The users "use whatever they want on their desktop… Microsoft if they want," Piédallu said.

"So we have some problems sometimes, and people are saying that it is not working, and we say, 'Yeah, so you just use different software'…"

This sums up the challenge facing proponents of digital sovereignty. Users are accustomed to Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Office works best in a Microsoft ecosystem, which is at odds with removing dependencies on non-European technology.

Microsoft and the other hyperscalers are hard habits to break, and while services like Nextcloud's are capable of handling storage and file synchronization, users accustomed to Microsoft's more visible applications and services, such as Office, will be trickier to migrate. But migrate they must to realize France's digital sovereignty dream.

"Nobody," said Piédallu, "should be able to switch off or shut down our services from the outside. Nobody should be accessing our services from the outside."

The Nextcloud Hub 26 spring release, which includes Euro-Office, became generally available last week. The Euro-Office productivity suite may go some way to satisfying desktop refuseniks. The EU wants to increase digital autonomy through the European Technological Sovereignty Package, although analysts have warned this could complicate matters for customers. 

The French Education Ministry's experience shows that sovereign file storage can work at scale. Persuading users to give up the tools they already know may prove the harder part. ®