If Universities are anything like other large public/public-adjacent organizations, the bulk of the in-house IT department was long since replaced by Microsoft resellers posing as IT. It’s insidious.

Not all universities in Europe are like this, but some are 100% like this. But if there was a larger political directive towards a more autonomous solution, it would eventually work, I think.

Can universities be given political directives like that in most European countries? In the UK they are usually (entirely?) independent, are non-profits and registered charities.

They get government funding for both (British resident) students and research so the government has leverage but would have to use that to incentivise them. I imagine at least some other European countries are much the same.

An even trickier question if you are interested in digital sovereignty is how to get the private sector to do the same. Running everything on AWS and requiring a mobile app to do anything seems to be almost instinctive for many organisations.

In most europeans countries afaik most (known) universities are public ie state-owned, with few exceptions. Big part or most of the funding is public too. Regardless of whether they are state-owned, the states usually set up the framework the universities operate in. How loose or tight is the state control varies from country to country. But there is always some way to meddle into university affairs and very often they do, in the context of public policy. Eg in the recent years universities tend to get very specific directives about from which countries they can freely form collaborations with academics and from which not, depending on the foreign policy of a country. A lot of stuff eg if and how a university can own property is also regulated depending on the country. It varies a lot, but I see no reason to set up some stricter framework wrt data sovereignty. Ime the supposed autonomy of the universities here is only on paper.

The trap of Microsoft is long contracts and setting up dependency. In many cases it was a big undertaking to get the current setup, now try convincing anyone to tear it out.

This. Not long ago, every organization had their own email server. It's only in the last 10-15 years or so that gullible IT managers drank the cloud kool-aid.

When I started doing cloud there were two options at my old company: AWS or Azure. I went for Azure.

Now I do m365 consulting and some Azure and I feel terrible. First of all those are terrible products, they lock you in heavily, they are overly complex. I would love if we started selling sovereign cloud solutions, open desk etc and I think our customers would be interested too. But we don't.

I'm actually thinking about starting my own business.