Dangerous reliance on foreign cloud providers
image: C Dustin via Unsplash
Experts warn that large-scale use of foreign cloud services poses risks. Reijer Passchier, Associate Professor of Constitutional Law and Professor of Digitalisation and the Democratic Rule of Law at the Open University, says it could be ‘life-threatening’ to Dutch RTL news.
Passschier recently published a critical book on the topic with the telling title The Curse of Big Tech. 'Big tech software works very smoothly and was initially very cheap. But the Dutch government never considered its strategic risks,' says Passchier. The possibility of services going down or being hacked is something we as users have no control over, as it falls under the laws and regulations of other countries. IT experts also think it is plausible that the US could use big tech as a geopolitical weapon. Passchier: ‘There could be life-threatening situations. If Microsoft goes down, we don't know what will still be working.’ This could cause problems in essential services (government, municipalities, universities, the port of Rotterdam, hospitals, banking, etc.) that depend on cloud infrastructure, such as e-mail, data storage and even business applications.
Officials at the Ministry of Digitalisation and Kingdom Relations are working hard to have a new government-wide cloud policy with ‘digital sovereignty’ ready by May. After all, the Netherlands, but also Europe, has an immense amount of ground to make up in order to eventually take control of digital infrastructure and data itself. A full transition to a Dutch model is expected to take ten years.
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Read the full RTL news article (in Dutch)