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This is taking it a bit far. The choice is a lot simpler in most cases, between the loss of privacy and the loss of productivity the choice is usually for the f

This is taking it a bit far. The choice is a lot simpler in most cases, between the loss of privacy and the loss of productivity the choice is usually for the former. Eventually for almost anything "computers" you'll loop back to a US company. Where do you think every EU company and institution is going "to the cloud"? Hetzner? OVH? Or AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI? The background being that there's little competition for the M365 ecosystem in general, least of all in the EU. EU has homegrown "bits and pieces" that could, maybe, somehow, go head to head with the equivalent bits from M365. But as soon as you need more of them you hit the integration and synergies wall and the advantages of M365 get compounded.

epolanski 3y ago
I'm surprised those agencies cannot setup their own infrastructure to be honest. We're not talking about high volumes of traffic, this is mostly internal tools for few hundreds/thousands people, of those few dozens at best concurrently connected? With all due respect those are few servers worth of hardware plus redundancy, plus all the security you want.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- realityking 3y ago
  The European Commission (which is the institution in question here) has a staff of about 32000 people. Other institutions (parliament, the courts, independent bodies) have their own staff. And while heavily concentrated in Brussels, they’re spread throughout the entire EU and also include 144 delegations abroad. This is not a small setup.
  - epolanski 3y ago
    This is still nothing particularly heavy, I've run with systems with far more concurrent users a decade ago on a handful of servers. Imho the real devil is the reliance on the suite itself, which is hard to replace, especially when you get mail/calendar/sharepoint/office/etc all bundled in one.
    - troupo 3y ago
      > This is still nothing particularly heavy, I've run with systems with far more concurrent users a decade ago on a handful of servers. The question isn't about "concurrent users". The question is about processes, documents, revisions, access levels, interdepartmental access, policies, and a billion other details.
moi2388 3y ago
It’s not about storing data with Microsoft and the like. It’s about allowing them to send that data back to the US, which allows their intelligence and data brokers to mine the data. That would not be allowed if it stayed in the EU, and there is literally no technical reason why it has to be sent to the US ever.

epolanski 3y ago

I'm surprised those agencies cannot setup their own infrastructure to be honest. We're not talking about high volumes of traffic, this is mostly internal tools for few hundreds/thousands people, of those few dozens at best concurrently connected? With all due respect those are few servers worth of hardware plus redundancy, plus all the security you want.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
realityking 3y ago
The European Commission (which is the institution in question here) has a staff of about 32000 people. Other institutions (parliament, the courts, independent bodies) have their own staff. And while heavily concentrated in Brussels, they’re spread throughout the entire EU and also include 144 delegations abroad. This is not a small setup.
- epolanski 3y ago
  This is still nothing particularly heavy, I've run with systems with far more concurrent users a decade ago on a handful of servers. Imho the real devil is the reliance on the suite itself, which is hard to replace, especially when you get mail/calendar/sharepoint/office/etc all bundled in one.
  - troupo 3y ago
    > This is still nothing particularly heavy, I've run with systems with far more concurrent users a decade ago on a handful of servers. The question isn't about "concurrent users". The question is about processes, documents, revisions, access levels, interdepartmental access, policies, and a billion other details.

moi2388 3y ago

It’s not about storing data with Microsoft and the like. It’s about allowing them to send that data back to the US, which allows their intelligence and data brokers to mine the data. That would not be allowed if it stayed in the EU, and there is literally no technical reason why it has to be sent to the US ever.