Today @BeLibre@mastodon-belgium.be published an article, "Beyond the Marketing: Measuring Microsoft’s Cloud Sovereignty in Europe".

In it, they publish a study where they measure how does Microsoft Cloud Stack measire in the European Commission’s Cloud Sovereignty Framework, since "people at Microsoft were asked, but did not answer how its services perform against this framework, while an estimated 90–95% of Belgian government services currently depend on Microsoft infrastructure."

The dependency is not a Belgium exclusive, and this study is relevant for all other EU countries (and beyond, I dare say).

To summarized conclusion is only clear in the actual document, where it claims:

BeLibre recommends organisations to implement stratified procurement: If needed, Microsoft services can be used for lower-classification workloads; European providers or self-hosted open-source for higher-classification workloads requiring SEAL-3+ across all objectives.

(SEAL-3+ is everything classified secret or top-secret)

https://belibre.be/en/sovereignty/mso-seal-assessment/

#eupol #digital #sovereignty

The following text was amended into a report in the European Parliament:

Reaffirms that the EU must remain sovereign in enforcing its laws, especially in the digital field; firmly condemns and calls for the cancellation of the travel bans imposed by the United States on civil society leaders Imran Ahmed, Clare Melford, Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon, whose work contributes to a safer digital environment for all and holds digital platforms accountable, as well as the travel ban imposed by the United States on former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, who played a key role in establishing EU digital rules; calls on the Commission and the Member States to deliver a firm response to these unprecedented attacks; notes recent enforcement actions taken under the Digital Services Act for breaches of transparency and risk-mitigation obligations, such as the EUR 120 million fine against X; recalls that enforcement of the EU’s digital legislation aims to ensure compliance with EU law and the protection of fundamental rights, and not to regulate political opinions; [...]

All (present) Portuguese MEPs voted in favor, except the members of the far-right party Chega (PfE).

Here are links to the amendment and the vote.

Repeat after me: AWS is no Euro Cloud or provides Digital Sovereignty, no matter what "local zone" you use.

@pluralistic@mamot.fr summing up my thoughts on where the current #DigitalSovereignty conversation is leading us towards:

I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.

I don't have any advice for how to do that. I'm sorry!