Europe begins to worry about US-controlled clouds
Interview with Bert Hubert about this major supply chain issue for EU governments:
The Register: In the US, the argument against China supplying network hardware [was] based on the concern that the Chinese government can just order China-based vendors to insert a backdoor. It sounds like you’re saying that, essentially, an analogous situation exists in the US now.
Hubert: Yeah, exactly. And that has been the case for a while. I mean, this is not an entirely new realization. The thing that is making it so interesting right now is that we are on the brink of [going all-in on Microsoft’s cloud].
The Dutch government is sort of just typical, so I mention it because I am Dutch, but they’re very representative of European governments right now. And they were heading to a situation where there was no email except Microsoft, which means that if one ministry wants to email the other ministry, they have to pass it by US servers.
Which leads to the odd situation that if the Dutch Ministry of Finance wants to send a secret to the Dutch National Bank, they’d have to send someone over with a typewriter to make it happen because [the communications channel has been outsourced].
There’s nothing left that we do not share with the US.
Tags: supply-chains clouds eu us politics geopolitics backdoors infosec security europe