DIGITAL SOVEREIGNTY
NETWORKS
PUBLIC SECTOR
The French Armed Forces Ministry signs with Microsoft again: two steps forward, one step back for digital sovereignty
The French Ministry of the Armed Forces is signing with Microsoft again. For years, we took one step forward and two steps back on digital sovereignty.
This time, we are taking two steps forward and one step back.
The step back: 200,000 Windows workstations on the Intradef network, a renewed contract and a report from the Defence Digital Commission (Commissariat au numérique de défense) pointing to a dependence that remains structural, up to the risk of a “kill-switch”.
The steps forward also deserve our attention.
The contract goes from five to three years. A signal pointing towards a possible switch to other tools.
At the same time, DINUM, the French government’s digital directorate, is officially moving its own workstations to Linux and requiring every ministry to draw up a sovereignty plan by the autumn (which starts next week!). Seven areas: workstations, collaboration tools, antivirus, AI, databases, virtualisation and network equipment.
It is the seventh that interests me. Network equipment. You can remove a router vendor from your infrastructure. A hardware swap can be organised in a few months. But if network exchanges still cross a dozen routers belonging to third-party companies, what is the point of controlling that tenth of the routers?
Because you can change operating systems in three years. Because you can move from WhatsApp to Treebal Pro (or another!) in a few days. Changing network architecture, interconnection, paths, network dependencies is not very complex, but few people in an organisation have this skill.
It is time to think about data transport, for real, and to think about it for the long term.
The Gendarmerie has been running Linux since 2008. That is nearly eighteen years, thanks to a decision that was upheld over time.
Data exchanges have to be built, budgeted for and maintained.
So we might as well start now, and change the other nine tenths of the routers, the ones we do not own, by finally controlling the paths our data packets take.
See: an illustration showing the path of our data between Nantes and Paris.
This news was first published on LinkedIn. To comment or share it, head to the original post. → See the post