Digital sovereignty: The reality of taking back control
We promised to share how our move to self-hosted Nextcloud is going. Here's the technical reality: what worked, what didn't, and how our innovation lab became essential.
When we decided to host our own Nextcloud instance, we knew we couldn’t just flip a switch. We needed a safe space to experiment, break things, and learn without disrupting daily operations.
That’s why we created our innovation lab: a sandbox environment where we could test configurations, integrations, and workflows before rolling them out company-wide.
The reality of the transition and what we’ve learned along the way
Living through this transition has given us a much deeper understanding of what digital sovereignty actually requires in practice. It’s given us insights that we are now directly applying to the projects we build for our public sector clients.
“Sovereignty is just as much about culture as it is about IT”
You can host your own servers and use open-source software, but if your team finds it too cumbersome, they will find a workaround. We learned very quickly that digital sovereignty requires robust change management. You have to train your team, listen to their frustrations, and adapt your workflows so that the sovereign choice is also the easy choice.
What’s next on the roadmap?
We’ve secured our files, our sharing, and our daily collaboration. But as we said in the first post, digital sovereignty isn’t a switch you flip; it’s a direction you walk.
So, what is the next beast we are tackling? Right now, we are looking closely at our communication and email infrastructure. These are deeply entrenched ecosystems, and untangling them is a massive undertaking. But the principles remain the same: we want to own our communications, ensure our metadata isn’t being mined, and guarantee that our public sector clients can rely on us for the long term.
Digital sovereignty requires technical competence, but it’s achievable. We’re still learning, still tweaking, but we’re in control—and that makes every hour of troubleshooting worthwhile.
Want to discuss your own setup? We’re happy to share our configurations and lessons learned.