As global concerns over digital sovereignty and cloud computing security grow, a new trend is quietly sweeping across Europe. Governmentsâlarge and smallâare taking action to reduce their dependence on Microsoft by switching to open-source technologies. This shift isnât only technical; itâs strategic, financial, and political. Hereâs a curated list of ten European countries making the move.
đ©đȘ 1. Germany â SchleswigâHolstein Leads the Way
Germany’s northern state of SchleswigâHolstein has become the most high-profile European region actively cutting Microsoft out of government IT. Since early 2025, itâs been migrating over 30,000 public sector computers to Linux, LibreOffice, Thunderbird, and Nextcloudâaiming for full independence by 2026.
This shift also involves replacing SharePoint and Active Directory, showing Germanyâs push for cloud computing security and local data control. By championing open-source tools, the state is also enabling smaller EU vendors to step in and serve public infrastructureâbreaking long-standing vendor lock-in.
When Schleswig-Holsteinâs cabinet signed off on its landmark âMasterplan Digitale SouverĂ€nitĂ€tâ back in late 2023, the headlines focused on cost. Insiders, however, insist that budgets were only the spark: the real driver was anxiety about handing petabytes of citizen data to a single foreign-owned vendor. The state CIO, Sven Thomsen, framed the dilemma in unusually blunt terms: âIf Microsoft can change its licence overnight, then so can its government.â What followed was a methodical two-year planning sprint. First came a legal review of procurement rules; then a forensic audit of 1,400 line-of-business apps to see which relied on VBA macros or proprietary Exchange connectors. Only after that audit did the political leadership green-light a phased desktop rollout of Linux, LibreOffice and Thunderbird, with a full switch to Nextcloud and Open-Xchange for collaboration. Pilot migrations in the ministries of Education and Finance produced an unexpected bonus: staff e-discovery requests that once took days in SharePoint dropped to minutes because the Nextcloud instance sits on German soil, free of the US CLOUD Act. By August 2024 the state treasury had already redirected the first âŹ4 million of licence savings into local SMEs hired to customise LibreOffice accessibility featuresâcode that is now upstream in the public repo. The final step, scheduled for October 2025, is mandatory adoption of OpenDocument as the only valid file format for inter-agency correspondence, with fall-back access to Microsoft formats limited to edge-case workstations. The administration expects to retire its last Office 2019 seat by Q2 2026, completing what analysts at EuroStack call âEuropeâs most ambitious real-world laboratory in cloud computing security.â