Digital sovereignty
Why Respellion is choosing digital sovereignty and moving its office work to self-hosted Nextcloud.
What is digital sovereignty, really? For us it’s quite simple: it’s the freedom to manage and adapt your own digital things. Think of your data, your files and your applications, without being locked in to a single vendor, and without a foreign government or a foreign company deciding what happens to your data. You stay in control!
It sounds logical, but in practice it’s less self-evident than you’d think. It’s often not all that transparent to work out what happens to your data. What are your options when a vendor suddenly raises the price, switches off a service, or even cuts off your access entirely? For our own company those are questions we increasingly want control over, but for the public sector, which we work for every day, it’s a matter of national importance.
The dependency is bigger than you think
As mentioned before, being fully sovereign isn’t self-evident. We won’t pretend we’re far removed from this ourselves. The dependency on the big tech companies is considerable, ours included. A handful of parties deliver just about everything: your operating system, your email, your documents, your storage and the tools to collaborate. All neatly slotted together, so it runs smoothly and is nice and easy.
And prying yourself loose from that is exactly what makes it so complicated. The ecosystem works so well that you barely notice how much you actually hand over. A measure of grip on your data, for instance, or on your costs, or on where you want to be a few years from now.
“We’re saying goodbye to a large American vendor and now run a big part of our office work on Nextcloud, which we host ourselves.”
What we set out to do this year
So this year we took a different direction. We’re saying goodbye to a large American vendor and now run a big part of our office work on Nextcloud, which we host ourselves. Our files, our sharing, our collaboration, in a place that we control.
It isn’t easy, we’ll admit that honestly. Over all those years you get used to an environment where everything clicks into place by itself, and that’s not something you match overnight. Sometimes you miss a button. Sometimes something works just a little differently than you’re used to. It takes time, and you have to be willing to learn a few things again.
Even so, we’re doing it deliberately. We choose certainty over convenience, while keeping our own hands on the controls. We’d rather put our energy into solutions that keep us in charge than into the convenience that ends up costing us dearly in the long run.
Why we go to this trouble
The reason is a bit of ‘practice what you preach’. We want to take responsibility for the way we build digital solutions, and for what those choices mean for the future. If we say that kind of thing to our clients, it’s at least as important to act on it ourselves.
Besides, it simply pays off. We learn a lot along the way, things we’d secretly half-forgotten. Not only about the technology, but also about the question of what we really need and what we’d only grown accustomed to. We take that experience to our clients, because they’re often wrestling with exactly the same questions.
“We’d rather put our energy into solutions that keep us in charge than into the convenience that ends up costing us dearly in the long run.”
And now?
Digital sovereignty isn’t a switch you simply flip. It’s more a direction you choose, step by step, with a bit of fiddling along the way. But every step brings us closer to a workplace that’s truly our own.
We’ve started. And we’d be glad to tell you how things are going on our end.