No government organization should ever be using foreign hosting, period, but using usa’s is an especially awful idea
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…
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.
Only considering?! Nevertheless good enough.
I think rather than good enough, it is a good start.
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
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.
The headline suggests they haven’t started 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.
Halt it, US dependencies can and will be using against you in the future
Put your private citizens data on US servers?
Nah. More like giving your private citizens data to HS government.
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
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.
Good. Get American technology out. Follow Germany’s lead.
do it!
I hope Sweden and more Erupoean contries does the same
I heard Japan is starting to get big in the cloud sector.
Lol
They don’t exactly have an excess of land to build datacenters
How so?
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
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.
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…
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.
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
Not even starting seems like the best way to deal with this halting problem
