Government agencies can pool their resources to operate a shared data center. If you take just a tax office, they are operating at scale where they have sufficient demand to operate 2-3 data centers per country in half of Europe. As for the skills, a for-profit SOE or a non-profit can deal with this as a regulated primary contractor. IT is a special case where consolidation and moving ops in-house actually makes sense at that scale. US gov does not do that likely for political reasons.
There are plenty of EU domiciled Managed Service Providers who do have the skills though.
Having your government infrastructure run in country and managed by your citizens seems like a good idea just in general. It helps to develop local skills and the people living in country have a better feel for the needs of the local people.
I am an American but this just seems like a good idea even if the current geopolitical situation was better.
There are European cloud providers though. American hyper scalers are not the only option. Lidl, Hetzner, OVH, ..etc.
I can spin up a dedicated server within 24-48hours or a VM within minutes on OVH. Also there have been plenty of white papers written about how much more expensive AWS is when compared to Hetzner or OVH.
The big cloud providers are quite expensive and come with a lot of geopolitical risk/baggage. European governments have safer alternatives within their own borders.
Edit: it’s Lidl who launched a cloud service not Aldi
Before the concept of cloud was a thing, every company and a computer room, smaller ones were literal closets, bigger ones were large data centers, with everything in between.
Are you saying deploying Debian/BSD on some servers in the basement of a government building is too complicated and more expensive than paying Microsoft/AWS?
Governments aren't scale-ups/unicorns to need the scalability and global availability of cloud, they're ossified known quantity entities with predictable userbases and traffic across a very specific geographical region. On-prem is perfect for that.
> In the fire, 384 battery packs were burnt, which took down 96 government systems. Whilst this is obviously still a huge loss, 95 of these had backups - but the G-drive system (government drive), used primarily by the Ministry of Personnel Management, did not.
> [...] reports estimate that 8 years worth of data was lost, and around 17% of central government officials are impacted
Being against on-prem just because South Korean government implemented on-prem poorly with no backup best practices and lost data one time, would be like if homo sapiens stopped using fire because a guy burned down his straw hut one time.
Yes but you're saying this guy needs to build his own house and trusting him to obey the fire and safety codes, when plenty of professionals exist that specialize in following those.
No it's essentially just that a bunch of hype people sold everyone on the idea "the cloud is the future" and so even government types think they have to do it to modernize even if it costs more, is less secure, and less reliable than just paying your own IT guy to do it.
On-prem is not expensive or complicated, people just make dumb choices. Any IT engineer with two years of experience can run a small on-prem data cluster.