Imagine being the person in the Finland Ministry of Justice who’s been railing on about this for years and constantly getting shit on by idiot managers who can’t install (or use) their own software. Watch it make the national news and then they decide to go ahead and use AWS anyway.
I’m pretty sure a lot of us are that person.
Halt it, US dependencies can and will be using against you in the future
All your data are belong to us.
American oligarchs will bribe the government to continue doing their bidding, even against nations that were once our allies.
That you even started to consider it in 2026 is bizarre, really
Not even starting seems like the best way to deal with this halting problem
Good. Get American technology out. Follow Germany’s lead.
Only considering?! Nevertheless good enough.
In order to halt they have to consider it first. There is some process required.
Then migration will take years if they already are established in US cloud services
The headline suggests they haven’t started using them yet.
Re-read the title. considering halting plans to. They aren’t using them yet.
From what I understand it was only a plan. So shouldn’t take long to change it. But due process is still required.
That was my first reaction, but anyone who’s been anywhere near the civil service knows it will take 16 meetings just to decide to have a meeting about it. The fact they’ve started considering it within a year means this must be high priority.
the fact that ministry of justice of any state, regardless of specific geopolitical problems going on at any given time, would just upload its data to any “cloud” no matter what state it is operated from, is mind blowing to me.
you would really expect some standards for such sensitive data.
Ditto. I would have expected most justice ministries to self-host or at least use domestic servers.
AWS and other US cloud hosts do have data centers in various “regions” (countries) around the world. Some countries have requirements that the servers are physically located there. And iirc, as I worked with some of this in the past, as an example some EU countries for their services required that only EU citizens had certain types of access to those systems. Ultimately they are still owned by US companies. But those companies try to accommodate their access requirements, in order to get their business. Not saying EU shouldn’t move away from US companies, but wanted to clarify some existing policies.
They’re still getting Amazon to store data that is critical to the function of the nation.
Government documents shouldn’t be on other people’s computers.
It’s so weird that a continent with the population, education and wealth of Europe struggles with… software? These are all solved problems and software development becomes easier by the day. Come on.
We only struggle with what we produce not being bought up by American giants.
Writing the software isn’t a problem. Having the company survive is.
I would assume this is more a Finland specific problem, AFAIK Slovakia for example has a private cloud for all government IT stuff.
Though that might be due to corruption in this state…
Ericsson was doing great until it got swallowed up by globalization.
The one-two punch of the US and China shuttered a lot of viable global infotech companies.
It would be interesting to study those cases, to see exactly what failed. We’re not weak and should be able to survive in „globalization“ context. Anyway, now it’s (more obviously) a matter of security too.
They didn’t used to. England in particular had a leg up during the PC revolution. There are also a lot of really great game studios there in the 90s.
And to be fair there still are some, but they broke al lot of ground in the early days. I don’t know what happened; American enshittification possibly left a bad taste in a lot of folks mouths.
The studios are still there in a lot of cases, but they are part of EA or other giants.
do it!
Finland already has very good datacenter companies, as one would expect…
I moved my VPS to a finnish company almost 10 years ago before data sovereignty was cool
I hope Sweden and more Erupoean contries does the same
