Nextcloud founder: Europe now truly breaking away from big tech

For years, the choice for an IT manager was simple: you went with Microsoft. It was the safe route; the path of least resistance. But the era of blind trust in big tech is over. Jos Poortvliet, co-founder of the German company Nextcloud, sees that the market is finally shifting. IO+ recently spoke with Poortvliet during Nextcloud Enterprise Day.

In the 1980s, a certain saying was often heard: “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM.” That mindset has fueled the shift toward American cloud giants over the past few decades. After all, if a project failed, you could always point to the supplier’s scale and resources. Jos Poortvliet sees that this sentiment is finally showing cracks. More and more often, people are opting for reliable European alternatives, such as Nextcloud: an open-source platform that allows you to manage your own secure cloud storage—similar to Google Drive or Dropbox—on your own server or NAS.

‘Colleagues thought he was crazy’

Poortvliet cites a striking example. “We have a client, Amnesty International in Spain, that uses Nextcloud. A while back, we organized a media event where we invited them to answer questions from journalists. During the introduction, their head of IT said, ‘We switched completely to open source eight years ago.’” He also mentioned that his colleagues at other organizations had called him crazy back then. And now, he said, those same colleagues are actually coming to him for advice.”

Many of the discussions surrounding big tech only really got underway about a year ago. Yet more and more governments and companies are following Amnesty’s example. “The momentum is clearly there—you can see the topic starting to gain traction everywhere. Last year, I often asked at events: the train seems to have left the station, but will it come back? Or is this the moment when it’s really going to happen? Now it feels more and more like the latter.” Things are also moving in the Netherlands. For example, SURF has made Nextcloud widely available for education and research.

Europe is way too dependent

According to Poortvliet, it was a mistake to make Europe so dependent on foreign parties, such as those from the U.S. or China. “We assumed they would never do anything harmful with our data. But that’s an assumption you can’t prove. Ultimately, it comes down to trust. Yet it remains a fragile foundation, precisely because that trust cannot be enforced when geopolitical interests come into play.”

At the international level, significant tensions are affecting digital privacy. For example, the U.S. has the Cloud Act, which requires tech companies like Microsoft to hand over data to the U.S. government when legally requested to do so. At the same time, Europe has strict rules, such as the GDPR, that aim to do exactly the opposite: protecting the data of European citizens and limiting access by external parties. In practice, this creates a conflict of interest.

Open source: the only way out

Relying more on European parties, therefore, makes sense—but according to the co-founder, only if they work with open source. Transparency must be the norm, not the exception. “At Nextcloud, we are therefore actively working on ‘cleaning up’ code to make everything transparent.” This stands in stark contrast to closed systems, where the code is often poorly documented and difficult to test.

Not yet at breakneck speed

There is clearly a shift underway in Europe, Poortvliet observes, but it is not yet happening at breakneck speed. “Some organizations, such as the Tax and Customs Administration, continue to cling to existing processes and claim there is no good alternative—a persistent narrative that big tech itself is eager to reinforce.” In practice, these are often minor objections, Poortvliet notes: “a missing button, a detail that works differently. That’s then used as an excuse to change nothing at all, even though a partial switch could already be a major step forward.”

Collaborating with multiple, smaller parties isn’t a bad idea in any case, he believes. “Do you think there’s a car manufacturer that wouldn’t panic if there were only one supplier for a certain chip or screw? That’s a huge risk. So why do we, as a government, accept that?”

Whether the shift from big tech to reliable European alternatives is proceeding at a snail’s pace or at breakneck speed, awareness seems to have grown significantly in any case.