European Commission mulls OVHCloud over Microsoft

The European Commission is in advanced negotiations with French cloud service provider OVHcloud to transition its cloud services away from Microsoft.

That’s what three senior sources with inside knowledge of the matter told Euractiv.

Interest in European-based digital services has skyrocketed since Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States of America, and tech executives like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Tim Cook rallied behind him.

Since then, more and more Member States of the EU are worried that American tech companies have become too big and powerful, and that they’ve become too dependent on the online services these companies provide. Therefore, we should opt for European alternatives to have greater control over our digital infrastructure and data, and protect our digital sovereignty. Especially when it comes to the cloud market.

One of the sources Euractiv spoke to said that the European Commission wants to set a precedent and is looking for a European cloud provider to replace Microsoft. The Commission has been discussing the option with the French cloud company OVHcloud for several weeks. An OVHcloud spokesperson has confirmed this.

“Discussions are indeed underway, both with the Commission and with other public and private institutions and organizations that are evaluating projects to migrate to a sovereign cloud,” he told the news outlet.

However, this doesn’t mean that the European Commission will actually switch away from Microsoft Azure to OVHcloud. The executive branch of the EU has been talking with an unknown number of other European cloud providers, including Germany's IONOS, France’s Scaleway, and Italy’s Aruba.

A spokesperson of the European Commission told Euractiv that the Commission is “constantly scanning the market” and already has a contract with OVHcloud.

Earlier this month, Danish Minister of Digitization, Caroline Stage, announced that her department wants to completely phase out Microsoft’s services. The Minister plans to remove Microsoft’s operating system from half of the employees’ computers this Summer and replace it with Linux. Microsoft’s Office 365 will be swapped for open-source software called Libre Office.

“If phasing out proves to be too complicated, we can revert back to Microsoft in an instant,” Minister Stage said in an interview.