Abruptly losing email services as a result of US sanctions: what happened to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague last year has served as a wake-up call for Dutch universities.
“What we need is to build a digital survival kit”, says Ruben Puylaert, spokesperson for Universities of the Netherlands (UNL), the umbrella organisation of Dutch universities. “What if something like what happened to the ICC were to occur? Which provider do you switch to then?”
Educational values under pressure
Reliance on American software is deeply entrenched. Microsoft in particular is the dominant player in Dutch higher education. And the Americans could simply pull the plug. Or hike prices considerably. Or secretly give others access to our data.
“This reliance puts the values of education and science under pressure”, UNL writes in a statement. It has set up a committee that also includes the government and IT cooperative SURF. This committee will assess the risks and identify short and long-term solutions.
Beyond email and office software, higher education institutions rely extensively on Microsoft also for cloud storage and network security. The rectors of all universities already raised concerns about this reliance in 2019, but in practice little has changed since then.
More attention
Nonetheless, awareness of this dependence is increasing. Last year, the House of Representatives called on the government to work with higher education institutions to strengthen the Netherlands’ digital autonomy.
Universities of applied sciences are also working on this, says a spokesperson for their umbrella association. For example, a few years ago, they joined forces with SURF to launch an ‘innovation zone’ aimed at exploring alternatives “to market parties that do not respect public values”.
At the end of last year, SURF began a pilot using software from the German company Nextcloud. This could serve as a partial alternative to Microsoft. The pilot has proven so popular that SURF is now expanding it.