Abstract:
The Dutch Tax and Customs Administration has decided to abandon its plan to migrate the entire office environment to the Microsoft 365 public cloud. Instead, it will use local servers controlled by the department and gradually introduce European open source software. The adjustments involve the Revenue and Customs Administration, customs departments and welfare agencies. The Dutch government previously planned to start the migration in 2025 and complete it by the end of 2026. About 5,000 employees have already been transferred to the new environment. The government suspended the project in July this year, and now it has officially changed to a parallel route of local deployment and open source.
A letter from Dutch State Secretary for Finance Elko Ellenberg to Parliament stated that the new working environment will be constructed in phases. Mail and calendar functions are planned to be implemented on local servers in 2027; personal file storage and collaboration functions are planned to gradually adopt European open source solutions later in 2027 and 2028. The government has not selected a specific software package and said it will use existing licenses where possible to reduce additional investment. This adjustment does not mean that Microsoft software will be completely stopped immediately, nor does it mean that the Dutch government has decided to replace the Office family with a certain open source office suite.
The background to the shift to local deployment was the criticism of the original public cloud plan by the Dutch ICT Assessment Advisory Committee. The committee believes that the Microsoft 365 implementation solution selected by the tax department has shortcomings in information confidentiality and availability, and cannot be applied to all information processing scenarios; it is based on an integrated solution from a single supplier and lacks a feasible exit path. It will also increase the risk of supplier lock-in and concentration, and weaken flexibility and digital autonomy. The committee also pointed out that the project management and risk control foundation was also insufficient, and recommended withdrawing the public cloud migration and redesigning the working environment.
The relevant assessment is based on the specific deployment plan designed by the Dutch government for the tax department, and does not assume that all Microsoft 365 configurations have the same problems. The tax department has previously moved about 5,000 employees into a public cloud environment, and originally planned to continue to promote it to the entire agency; the government has now chosen to operate or control the servers itself, re-evaluate the system design and implementation steps, and stated that it will absorb the evaluation committee's recommendations on security, governance and future adaptability.
This decision also reflects the European public sector’s continued focus on digital sovereignty and the control of sensitive data. For the tax department, choosing local infrastructure and open source components is expected to increase control over data storage, software selection and exit paths, but the new system architecture, migration schedule and specific products have yet to be clarified; email calendar deployment and storage, and collaboration tools adopt different technical routes, which also means that compatibility, operation and maintenance, and data management are still issues that need to be solved in the future.
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