The short version For decades, governments and organizations could run services based on servers we actually owned. These days, we’ve allowed the IT world to convince us no computing is possible outside of US-style clouds, for which we have no European equivalents. And because of this conviction, we are now moving our most precious data and most critical services to US controlled servers. Yet most of European government software still runs on locally owned systems.| Bert Hubert's writings
A brief addition to the 50000 words I wrote earlier on the cloud: what is the European situation? Software Initially, companies and governments would buy licenses to software. You’d typically have a piece of software in your office, on one of your computers, to calculate payroll with. Most other computers would have copies of WordPerfect installed. This software would function for years without updates or maintenance. If WordPerfect-the-company would disappear, you would not even notice.| Bert Hubert's writings
The very brief version: “going to the cloud” can mean renting services/servers that you could get from anywhere. There’s little lock-in. The same four words “going to the cloud” might also mean locking your operations to a specific cloud provider, whose proprietary services will now be part of your business processes “forever”. Be specific which variant of cloud you are signing off on! I’m mostly out of the office but this post was already in the pipeline and I thought it migh...| Bert Hubert's writings
There’s now also an English version of this post. De hele korte versie: organisaties twijfelen vaak vele jaren over het uitbesteden van dingen, met name ICT. Gedurende die jaren vertrekken de goede ICT-mensen, want steeds je eigen bestaan moeten rechtvaardigen is rot. Op termijn gaat er dan weleens iets goed mis, en is de keuze daarna makkelijk: we kunnen en willen dit niet meer zelf doen. Maar door jaren te twijfelen heb je het daar zelf naar gemaakt.| Bert Hubert's writings
This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. This is a lightly edited transcript of my presentation today at the ACCSS/NCSC/Surf seminar ‘Cyber Security and Society’. I want to thank the organizers for inviting me to their conference & giving me a great opportunity to talk about something I worry about a lot. Here are the original slides with notes, which may be useful to view together with the text below.| Bert Hubert's writings
