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The political temperature around digital sovereignty has risen across Europe. France is replacing Teams and Zoom with a nationally developed videoconferencing platform. Germany's Schleswig-Holstein is migrating 30,000 civil servants off Microsoft entirely. Denmark is switching its digital ministry to LibreOffice and has put digital independence at the center of its national strategy. The European Commission has faced formal scrutiny from its own data protection supervisor over its use of Microsoft 365.
All of this raises the question: will Europe actually make the break, or is it political theater staged in front of infrastructure that's already too entrenched to move?
Those who understand the technical reality suggest the answer is: not quickly, not cheaply and not by treating it as a software procurement decision.
Geopolitics Changes the Game
For years, the conversation about European digital independence was primarily in the context of data privacy and GDPR compliance. That has shifted.
With U.S. cloud providers holding more than 80% of the European cloud market, the concentration looks less like a commercial arrangement and more like a strategic vulnerability, said Thomas Berndorfer, the Portugal-based CEO of Connecting Software and cybersecurity ambassador for SME Connect's digital tools program.
With transatlantic relations under strain, Berndorfer warned that companies are asking whether cloud and IT access could be used as political leverage. "Under current conditions, much of the European economy's survival rests on their continued access to American tech," he said. It is a statement that, not long ago, would have seemed alarmist.
Sovereignty is more substantive than protectionism dressed up as privacy, said David Tyler, CEO of Outlier Technology, a U.K.-based technology consultancy.
The issue is recognizing that critical digital infrastructure now sits inside a foreign legal jurisdiction demonstrating a willingness to act unilaterally in ways few anticipated, Tyler said. That matters because it makes the situation more urgent. Europe is not debating vendor preferences, but strategic exposure.
What Is Being Replaced?
The conversation about European alternatives has focused almost entirely on the visible layer: Can LibreOffice replace Word? Can Nextcloud replace SharePoint? Can some European videoconferencing platform replace Teams?
This misses the point, Tyler said. What Microsoft actually owns inside most large organizations is not just a set of productivity applications, but the security and identity spine through which everything else runs: authentication, conditional access policies, device management, security groups accumulated over decades, SharePoint permission structures that nobody fully understands and Power Automate flows that hold business processes together.
Most people using these systems daily have no idea the spine exists, until a migration begins and it fails.
"The real cost is not the licenses, it is rebuilding identity, compliance and workflows while the business keeps running,” said Richard Harbridge, Microsoft MVP and technology and ecosystem strategist at ShareGate.
The actual migration challenge bears little resemblance to the vendor comparison that dominates the policy conversation. Most large enterprises have spent years layering work on top of Microsoft 365, Harbridge said. The biggest cost drivers are not moving files, but integration rework, governance and permissions debt and the productivity dip that sets when two systems have to run in parallel.
Moreover, in many European companies, even experienced staff have never used non-U.S. enterprise applications, Berndorfer noted. The training burden alone — before any files have been migrated — represents months of reduced operational efficiency.
European Alternatives Are Improving
European alternatives are legitimate. Harbridge pointed to initiatives such as openDesk, Germany's sovereign workplace stack integrating multiple open-source collaboration tools, and France's plan to move government videoconferencing onto a national platform by 2027. These are substantive programs with government backing and measurable adoption.
But Harbridge is careful to distinguish between replacing specific workloads and replacing the end-to-end bundle. "Europe can replace layers at scale, but end-to-end parity across identity, compliance and integrations is still the hardest part,” he said.
In addition, European alternatives for collaboration, storage, identity and open-source productivity are increasingly viable in isolation, said Milos Rusic, co-founder and CEO of Berlin-based deepset, which builds enterprise-grade platforms for agentic AI applications. What these tools lack is ecosystem density, or the connective fabric that allows disparate components to interoperate at enterprise scale. That is not a technical issue but an investment and coordination problem.
The history of attempts should, however, give pause. Munich's LiMux project — perhaps the most scrutinized public-sector migration in Europe — reversed course after years of effort and cost.
Whatever weight you assign to the technical vs. organizational causes, the outcome is the point: a well-resourced government couldn't finish the job.
Denmark's current effort includes, by the minister's own public admission, a contingency plan to revert to Microsoft if the transition proves too complex.
Reducing Dependency Incrementally as the Way Forward
As experts agreed, wholesale replacement is not a realistic near-term objective, and pursuing it as such is likely to produce expensive failures.
"The thing that will kill any of these projects is if they're treated as tooling projects rather than structural change programs,” Tyler said. The right approach, he added, is not ripping out Microsoft but reducing its influence incrementally, starting with identity and security infrastructure, minimizing new lock-ins in future technology acquisitions and building exit strategies into procurement decisions from the outset.
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Vendor lock-in was something CIOs actively managed two decades ago — until the cloud and SaaS era made the economics of dependency feel painless, and the habit died, Tyler added.
But the next phase of dependency is already forming, Rusic said. As AI becomes embedded into enterprise workflows, the question is shifting from who provides email and file storage to who controls how enterprise data is accessed, combined and deployed for decision-making.
"The real dependency risk is increasingly at the knowledge orchestration layer between enterprise data and AI, not the document editor," Rusic warned. If Europe has been slow to recognize its productivity software dependency, the AI infrastructure dependency now forming beneath it may prove harder to unwind because by the time the problem is visible, it will already be locked in.
Dismantling Two Decades of Infrastructure
Europe can reduce its dependence on U.S. workplace technology. Alternatives are improving, the political will is present in a way it has not been for a generation and the geopolitical incentive has sharpened.
But the path runs through multi-year engineering programs, sustained investment in open standards and a more candid political conversation about what sovereignty requires — not a new set of logos sitting on the same dependencies, but a sequenced rearchitecting of the infrastructure that most organizations spent two decades building on someone else's foundations.
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