That you even started to consider it in 2026 is bizarre, really
It’s a government thing. I’m not sure when they’ve started to consider alternatives, but that renewal process (as old systems are on EOL) has most likely been on the table for years.
do it!
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.
From what I understand it was only a plan. So shouldn’t take long to change it. But due process is still required.
Re-read the title. considering halting plans to. They aren’t using them yet.
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.
I hope Sweden and more Erupoean contries does the same
I heard Japan is starting to get big in the cloud sector.
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.
no matter what state it is operated from
Not disagreeing, but if Trump hadn’t won a second term there really wouldn’t be a dire reason to avoid the US. Sure they would be better of choosing a local or at least European provider, but most politicians (naively) didn’t see the current hostility coming.
but most politicians (naively) didn’t see the current hostility coming.
i don’t think that’s relevant. such sensitive data should be kept in-house and well guarded, not uploaded into public cloud.
Good. Get American technology out. Follow Germany’s lead.
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.
Europe struggles with agile, in my experience
Agile is just one possible way to organize things and many developers don’t even like it or think that it improves productivity.
The company would have to be suitable for it. Force fitting the principles from agile manifesto isn’t going to be useful.
Why exactly do you think that Europe‘s failure relates to agile? To me it seems more an incentive problem, which would be completely outside of software specific methodology
How Lack of Agile Ties to European Tech Limitations:
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Slower Time-to-Market: The tech industry demands high-speed, iterative, and “fail-fast” development cycles to dominate consumer markets. European firms tend to have slower product development cycles compared to US counterparts, often favoring long-term planning over rapid, iterative, and agile software development.
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Talent and Structural Rigidity: Rigid labor structures and high restructuring costs in Europe make it difficult to pivot, scale teams quickly, or adopt flexible, “sprint-based” agile approaches, unlike US firms that can rapidly restructure teams.
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“Middle Technology Trap” & Risk Aversion: Many European companies excel in mature technologies (e.g., traditional engineering) rather than the rapid, agile software development required for consumer internet platforms. This leads to a risk-averse culture, where firms hesitate to make the massive, risky investments in software that define US Big Tech.
I didn’t say it’s the only factor, it’s just one I’ve noticed. Other factors might be more important. At the end of the day, it’s not like we can run experiments to see how the world evolves with different factors, in order to know precise causality and mechanisms.
Oh, that’s how you mean agile, as in opposed to rigidity, long term planning, bureaucracy, etc. in that sense you’re fully right. Though I imagine that much of it fades away if the incentives are right (e.g high pressure tends to weaken bureaucracy).
There are other rapid/flexible methods without sprint planning, dailies, etc. but this might be a bit too detailed for the general idea here.
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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.
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…
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.
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.
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
Halt it, US dependencies can and will be using against you in the future
All your data are belong to us.
Put your private citizens data on US servers?
Nah. More like giving your private citizens data to HS government.
American oligarchs will bribe the government to continue doing their bidding, even against nations that were once our allies.
Not even starting seems like the best way to deal with this halting problem
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.
Some of us here think it’s no coincidence the move was considered just as a right wing government happens to be in power. Especially since there was no significant cost savings from the proposed move.
It was already unpopular, but the USA going full Putin now has the average Finn also seeing it as suspicious, instead of just the left wing.
i mean, reality has a slight left wing bias.
Bit late to the party, but good to see another country waking up to the realisation that the US cannot be trusted. Now if only my own country would realise that…
No government organization should ever be using foreign hosting, period, but using usa’s is an especially awful idea
Hosting with close allies shouldn’t be a problem.
Within the EU, I still don’t care in which country the data is hosted
It’s still a problem. Never forget that today’s friend can be tomorrow’s enemy.
Easier said than done for a country that size, but I always think it would be amazing if Finland could band together with a couple dozen or so other European countries to form some kind of cooperative Union that would allow the creation of this kind of project. I also imagine that if such a thing did exist and you were a part of it you’d have to be a complete fucking dickbasket to leave it but that’s neither here nor there.
Dickbaskets have an annoying habit of getting into positions of power.
