Techniek & Innovatie Cloud Services
Technology & Innovation Cloud Services
Text Jos Wassink
© Images Ontwerpwerk with MidJourney
Many researchers believe that universities have become overly dependent on large US ICT companies and wonder whether it’s possible to turn this around. A trial of the NextCloud open-source platform has started at five Dutch universities and may provide an answer.
The Netherlands is seeing an everincreasing use of cloud services. This involves hardware, software or data over the internet, which comes with risks such as data leaks or the financial collapse of the provider. “It’s not as bad as in the US or the UK yet,” says Seda Gürses (Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management), “but everything here is also quickly outsourced without much consideration, and that’s worrying.” A recent Delft example is the migration of email and calendar items from TU servers to the Microsoft cloud. The TU Delft Works Council expressed concerns about this late last year. Are things such as company information on finances, personal details about staff illnesses and reports on staff performance properly protected?
Universities in the Netherlands are leading the way in the use of cloud services, as in the US and the UK.
However, universities in other European countries are more cautious and still provide many ICT services themselves. Seda Gürses (TPM) and Tobias Fiebig (Max Planck Institute) discovered that the trend of outsourcing ICT services began long before the COVID-19 pandemic. Why is this reliance on cloud services such a problem?
Apart from the growing cultural divide between Europe and the US after Trump’s election, Gürses and Fiebig believe that dependence on US ICT companies is undesirable because of their lack of respect for academic freedom. Gürses also feels that Microsoft software is mainly geared towards (US) business and that customisable open-source software is better suited to the open, educational nature of a university.
Sovereignty
AI researcher Roel Dobbe (also TPM) discusses the surrendering of sovereignty. “It has been scientifically proven that (by outsourcing to cloud services, ed.) you not only surrender your data but also your ability to shape your services or primary functions.” Price is often the deciding factor when tendering for ICT projects, says Dobbe, and other requirements are quickly forgotten. “In education, we’ve therefore increasingly moved to a Microsoft or Google environment in which you gradually lose your autonomy and end up in a trap from which it is difficult to escape.”
Erik Scherff, director of ICT at TU Delft, agrees with this analysis. “More and more has been outsourced over the last 10-20 years. This gradually came about because, for example, there were really good software packages in the field of education.” As a result, TU Delft’s ICT department developed increasingly less software itself. “We run hundreds of applications here, most of which are not in the cloud.”
The TU handles most of the data storage itself in its two in-house data centres. It also uses services and storage at the SURF education and research ICT corporation. Scherff says he does not see Microsoft as ‘the bad guy’. For him, Office-365 is just one of hundreds of programs offered by the ICT department. He’s concerned about ‘digital sovereignty’, which he defines as: the control over data and infrastructure and the freedom to choose whether to purchase or develop their own software.
Dutch universities rarely use US companies to store their data in the cloud and only do so with permission. SURF also stores most data from its services on its own servers. So says Wladimir Mufty, digital sovereignty programme manager at SURF. In addition, SURF has contracts with commercial cloud services such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle.
You end up in a trap from which it is difficult to escape
Universities can choose from 13 providers, including Dutch ones. He understands the concerns about data at US ICT companies but believes that it has more to do with cloud software than cloud storage. “The US Secret Service can just nose through your data,” says Mufty. In doing so, it does not matter whether the server is in America, Frankfurt or Middenmeer because a US company is governed by US law.
AlgoSoc
An open-source platform trial was started in February to hopefully reduce the entanglement of Dutch universities and US ICT companies and invest in decentralised storage for independent education. Seventy Dutch researchers across five universities (TU Delft, University of Amsterdam, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Utrecht University and Tilburg University) will collaborate through the NextCloud platform. All participants are members of the AlgoSoc research programme, an NWO (Dutch Research Council) programme that researches public values in a society increasingly affected by manipulative algorithms.
Seda Gürses and Roel Dobbe are the Delft members of AlgoSoc, which also includes lawyers, communication experts, data scientists, AI researchers, psychologists and behavioural scientists. They meet on NextCloud, a collaborative environment that replaces Zoom, Teams, Google Docs, Outlook and other programs. “Of course, we will carry out all kinds of penetration tests to see if we can hack the server. What’s the state of the security and privacy? Does the system do what it promises?”, explains Mufty. The trial will last two years and he will be following it with interest. “If the software turns out to be satisfactory and there is a need for it in the Netherlands, we might start offering NextCloud through SURF after just one year.” ICT director Erik Scherff says he wants to offer NextCloud but not make it mandatory: “I hope this will enable us to take a concrete step towards greater digital autonomy, which is something we have only talked about up to now.”