The Dutch IRS just doubled down on M365 though saying they couldn't find any alternative. Strange detail though is that they were not on a cloud service until now. It's a bit of a weird time to decide to migrate to a US cloud service when most places are trying to get away from them.
I'm not surprised, I used to work for a cloud SaaS provider, everything we had ran on Linux, everyone in the office ran on Macs and Google Docs.
Then as we grew the finance team, they found that Google Docs couldn't handle the spreadsheets they needed, and even Excel on Mac wasn't compatible.
So, the Finance team started running VM's where they could run Windows and native Excel. Then as they grew (in size and power) they found themselves using the VM so much that they started moving from Mac to Windows laptops. Then as our windows footprint grew, more and more departments started requesting Windows.
When I left around 25% of the ~1000 person company was on Windows (almost all on the corporate admin side, engineering remained overwhelmingly on Mac), and the Windows support team was twice as large as the team that managed the Mac infrastructure.
I see it used very much for the wrong purposes though. It's a really mediocre database for example. It allows numbnuts to make really poorly designed stuff that then worms its way into critical business processes.
Microsoft could have worked to make access more accessible to non technical users. But they didn't bother.
Similar experience. The best excuse was that Google Sheets wasn't secure enough for the head of finance to store his passwords, so need needed a password protected Excel sheet. He also got phished for about $50k.
"De Belastingdienst, met daarnaast ook de Douane en de Dienst Toeslagen, gebruikt momenteel eigen software voor kantoorautomatisering."
This is M365 so it's not to do with Azure. It says they used their own office software before that was not cloud. That's what I referred to.
I was not aware what they do with the more traditional cloud stuff but I'm not surprised they handed everything on a silver platter to the US though. The neolib party that has been in power for the last 20 years is super US centric and their previous prime minister is now acting as Trump's lapdog as general secretary of NATO.
