Dutch education system and municipalities strive for digital sovereignty

Following two successful Nextcloud Enterprise Days in The Hague in 2025, we brought the event to Utrecht this year, where a massive 750 registrations brought a big crowd to the Jaarbeurs venue. The kickoff in the morning pre-announced the launch of the book “Sovereignty! But how?“ by well-known Dutch IT security journalist and author Brenno de Winter.

The book aligns with the evolution of conversation that has happened since the previous two enterprise days. Few discussed whether sovereign solutions are viable or which solution to pick. Instead, the conversation has moved to procurement, migration strategies, and roll-out.

In the Netherlands, that shift is especially visible in education and municipalities. Several initiatives presented at the event are piloting Nextcloud or are already moving into deployment.

Dutch initiatives that are choosing digital sovereignty

Cloudwise: Nextcloud in elementary and middle schools

One example is Cloudwise, which offers smart solutions for technical and educational challenges, enabling more than 4,500 elementary and middle schools to work seamlessly in the cloud. At Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Utrecht, Nextcloud and Cloudwise announced a partnership to make a future-proof, European-based cloud alternative available to the education sector, based on Nextcloud technology and Cloudwise’s educational expertise and platforms.

SIVON: Nextcloud in schools

More and more schools want to be less dependent on Big Tech companies and keep more control over their digital future, according to SIVON, the ICT cooperative for 476 school boards across the Netherlands. Tomas Harreveld (Advisor, OSPO and Digital Autonomy at SIVON) presented how to gain more digital sovereignty in primary and secondary education.

MBO: Nextcloud in vocational training

Building on that, a pilot with vocational education institutions (Middelbaar Beroepsonderwijs, MBO) was announced. Now, 15 organizations participate, and the team announced that an extension to about 50 organisations is involved. The setup follows the same approach: start with specific workloads and expand from there. But attendance at the event was also described by the team as a search for input, feedback, and options for the MBO sector.

As Rob Vos, Digitalization Strategist at MBO Digitaal, put it:

We have a dream, and all change starts there. So we got started, rather than wait and watch. We start small, an approach that fits the MBO well — but once things are moving, they won’t stop.

Rob Vos

Digitalization Strategist at MBO Digitaal

SURF: Scaling Nextcloud for universities

The IT cooperative of Dutch education and research institutions SURF announced to offer members an additional opportunity to join the Nextcloud pilot due to high demand. SURF already operates the Nextcloud-based SURF Drive for 80,000 users but is looking to expand functionality to a complete, sovereign digital workplace. Hans Louwhoff, SURF board member: “We are taking an important step towards greater digital autonomy for our members. The high level of interest shows that this is a live issue. That is why it makes sense to give more institutions the opportunity to participate.”

Technische Universität Berlin (Technical University Berlin) is already a long-standing Nextcloud user. Thomas Hildmann, Deputy Head of ZECM (Center for Campus Management), provided a detailed overview of the implementation and configuration of Nextcloud for tens of thousands of users at the university.

Strive for digital sovereignty also in the public sector

But the strive for digital sovereignty is not limited to education. A similar development is also taking place in the public sector.

Jacco Brouwer from the coalition of Dutch municipalities (VNG) and Erik Dolle, CIO at the city of Ede, spoke about the wide range of Nextcloud pilots and proof of concepts happening across Dutch municipalities. Cities are serious about creating autonomy, recognizing the risks that come with dependence on big foreign tech vendors.

Together with partners, experts from the Municipalities of Baarn and Amsterdam provided insights into getting started with digital autonomy and Nextcloud as the foundation for municipal services.

Elen Mol presented the vision and current state of sovereignty efforts at the city of Amsterdam. Cooperating with the G4, the larger 4 cities in the Netherlands there is a Nextcloud Hub pilot in progress after a proof of concept test comparing some rivals showed Nextcloud was the most mature solution. The city aims to have its full infrastructure sovereign by 2030.

Looking across borders: digital sovereignty in Austria and France

System integrator Atos and Microsoft integration specialist Sendent presented how the Austrian Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism (BMWET) transformed a Microsoft-only workspace into a hybrid Nextcloud environment. The ministry rolled out Nextcloud for 1,200 employees in just four months from proof of concept to go-live and now benefits from secure, flexible collaboration under full data control.

Atos, which was present at the event with a significant team, is active across the Dutch federal government in projects to replicate the success in Austria.

Isabelle Blanc of the French Ministry for the Ecological Transition provided insights into how the ministry integrated Nextcloud and Collabora into their sovereign collaboration suite BNUM for 50,000 users. The ministry emphasized how the organization benefits from interoperability, security, collaboration, and sovereignty through open source solutions.

Nextcloud’s growing partner ecosystem

To make the high-performance, sovereign open-source platform more widely available for organizations, IT services provider Centric announced a partnership with Nextcloud to offer a common sovereign workspace solution for the public sector in the Netherlands.

Centric will fully manage Nextcloud workspaces, ensuring the highest performance and security standards and giving clients maximum control over where their data is stored. This will be particularly beneficial for the federal government, municipalities, decentralised governments, and other organisations operating within or on behalf of the public sector.

In the words of Maarten Hillenaar, Director Corporate Development at Centric:

From our many conversations with people from public organisations, we have learned that they are facing challenges regarding data access, security, legislation, vendor dependency, and transparency. Therefore, we are happy to expand our sovereign portfolio to include a sovereign workspace solution based on Nextcloud.

Maarten Hillenaar

Director Corporate Development at Centric

The leading telecommunications and IT service provider in the Netherlands, KPN, presented its sovereign cloud working environment for Dutch organizations and its sovereign-by-design framework. The solution is hosted and managed entirely in the Netherlands in KPN’s data centers. This gives organizations more control over their data, ensures they comply with European laws and regulations, and makes them less dependent on international developments or parties.

Dutch Nextcloud partner Sendent also announced Sendent M365 Office Online integration, which integrates Microsoft 365 Office Online with Nextcloud to enable a gradual shift toward digital autonomy. Microsoft is retiring Office Online Server (on-prem) this year, which forces organizations to either move fully into Microsoft 365 in the cloud or lose browser-based editing. With the integration, users can open and edit files in Microsoft 365 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) but stored in Nextcloud, in the browser, without downloads or workflow changes.

Insights from experts: integration solutions and a book reading with a cat-filled presentation

Additional sessions included a wide range of integration solutions around sovereign workspaces. Speakers included the expert in email, groupware, and storage migration audriga, project management software provider OpenProject, wiki software platform XWiki, the provider of online collaborative document editing, Collabora Online, IT service provider Bechtle, and digital security company ESET.

One of the highlights for many attendees: Brenno de Winter did a reading from his recently published book on digital sovereignty: “Sovereignty! But how?”

It was a different format compared to the rest of the sessions. While most talks focused on implementations and projects, this shifted the perspective towards how public sector organisations deal with dependency and long-term decisions.

In a cat-loaded presentation, Brenno went over the history of sovereignty, touching on the 30-year war and the enlightenment, and the shifting positions of state, church, and, of course, the emergence of the democratic mandate. Now, modern technology and the emergence of corporations have changed the traditional picture of a ’trias politica’ of legislative, judicial, and executive branches.

While the fourth estate, supposed to hold power to account, is getting undermined, big corporations seem poised to take a fourth position. He went over recent data security and privacy events, from Snowden to GDPR, ending with the current situation. Brenno summarized the essence of the book: what to do.

Written for decision-makers, the book offers an analysis with actionable insights, checklists, and is based on existing frameworks.

What’s next for digital sovereignty in the Netherlands and beyond

The Netherlands is clearly gaining momentum in this space, with concrete projects underway across education, the public sector, and service providers. Many of these efforts are still in early stages, but they are moving forward in parallel and starting to attract broader attention.

We’ll be back soon! And we are curious to see these initiatives develop over the coming months.

If you are interested in further developments, join us at the upcoming customer event, Nextcloud Enterprise Day Bern in Switzerland, or our flagship event, the Nextcloud Summit, on June 9 in Munich. See you there?