https://slashdot.org/story/25/12/19/2252254/airbus-moving-critical-systems-away-from-aws-google-and-microsoft-citing-data-sovereignty-concerns(for those that gave up on any value slashdot comments might have :
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/airbus_sovereign_cloud/ )
Who knew espionage was bad for business. I am sure they are thrilled at losing contracts from the big old giant companies that THROW money at them and had basically guaranteed business operations for at least 30+ years. Airbus is not some server rack some where, its like a institution that makes real stuff. Its not some service thing that can disappear in like 2 months without a trace or memory.
Reminds me of some places that would like ban file sharing stuff because some people downloaded junk films they would not bother picking up off the street lol, despite that it has like massive use for development people and OS (the concept that it catered to loud cronies that feel slighted, in general, on the little footnote about the email address being disabled)
And I think their 80/20 is only the 'negotiating standpoint' for desired cost. They can probably pay someone to develop the requirements easily.
Not thrilled about the reasons cited by the article though, cloud stuff, I can't seem to forget that this word like AI, blockchain, iot, devops, smart, synergy, etc got used because they knew the approver for the endeavor would was hot for it thinking they would get rich. I kind of noticed the biggest reason they might want that stuff is because you can have like super bootleg contractors that don't know how to use any systems 'in the loop and looking official' on super virtual machines.
Yep! Basically every EU based company should go that way. US' PATRIOT and CLOUD act are incompatible with EU law. And with the current political situation it's strongly recommended to become more self-sufficient anyway.
This is completely unsurprising, and is very similar to what happened in the late 70s and early 80s. Then it was the timeshare bureaux that were able to hold their customers' data "hostage".
The IBM PC and Microsoft enabled a collective sigh of relief as customers were able to migrate
Next question: has the International Criminal Court been crippled, and if so, by whom?
Yep! Basically every EU based company should go that way. US' PATRIOT and CLOUD act are incompatible with EU law. And with the current political situation it's strongly recommended to become more self-sufficient anyway.
Yes and beyond political questions, it's not good at all to have that kind of near-monopoly at all anyway. It's nonsense.
Yep! Basically every EU based company should go that way. US' PATRIOT and CLOUD act are incompatible with EU law. And with the current political situation it's strongly recommended to become more self-sufficient anyway.
Yes and beyond political questions, it's not good at all to have that kind of near-monopoly at all anyway. It's nonsense.
Yes, even if AWS works well, even if it was cost effective (which it really isn't), even if there were no political concerns, it is just stupid, long-term, to put all the eggs in the same basket.
Kinda silly that they even started in the first place, i mean billion dollar companies couldn't get enough space to install a few servers around the office? No server room? At least they're waking up, better late than never...
"Cloud" seems cheap but seldom ever remains cheap. Most web people really take the concept of "elastic computing" to heart and write absolute garbage code which absolutely eats up cloud credits like child at a confectionary.
I'm guessing airbus will be very happy with the massive cost reduction that they achieved with this move
Well, centralized storage and computing resources are the "pinnacle" of computing business since the very beginning. And that's currently how big tech companies make their profits.
From the POV of the companies using those services, it's more the promise of reducing costs (which is not always the case actually) and getting rid of some responsibilities. People love keeping their power while having fewer responsibilities.
If your company hosts its own computing/storage infrastructure and there is a major downtime, the consequences will be 100% on your company's shoulders, and more specifically the IT dept and ultimately the CEO. Now, if your company switches to AWS instead and AWS has a major failure, what happens? Big headlines in all media worldwide pointing to AWS and you become just the victim. Yes, your business may be at stake, yes, you may have some furious customers as a consequence, but who cares? It's not your fault. That's really the main appeal here and companies will switch back to more independence only if they are literally forced to.
Cost is not a concern, neither is infrastructure dependency. This is about data sovereingty. It is becoming #1 Theme for the next few years.
...
Next question: has the International Criminal Court been crippled, and if so, by whom?
Yes, by internal corruption.
/politics
Airbus is big enough not to need anything from the AWS stack, hell they have no unpredictable load, what do they need public cloud for? They need to just rent racks for all their Linux server requirements, a private cloud.
At least Azure gives them Microsoft 365 to get an alternative flavour of maintaining their own on site Windows clusterfuck ... when you have decades of legacy tying you up in Microsoft any way, a little change is nice, even if it's not an improvement.
I think they like it because its BIG and they prefer to deal with big companies that have enough like resources to interface with them on the BS
small companies sometimes dont know WTF to do when dealing with a giant.
And it sounds 'good'. Non computer technical people will just look "oh so you are doing something similar to that really expenisve smart internet tech company is doing for internet.. ok.. we can cancel about 45 inquiries meetings"
That is a good solution, and later you can figure out how to drop costs with 'digestible' changes once you have some solid data/experience (control)
Yep! Basically every EU based company should go that way. US' PATRIOT and CLOUD act are incompatible with EU law. And with the current political situation it's strongly recommended to become more self-sufficient anyway.
They are incompatible with the spirit of the law.
But they are not incompatible with the actual law, since there is an exception for the US, the so called "Privacy shield". Which boils essentially down to "Trust me, bro".
And after that statement of the microsoft lawyer infront of a french court, that microsoft cannot guarantee that the US government cannot access data even on EU servers, the last fig-leaf has been torn off this sham called "Privacy shield".
...
Next question: has the International Criminal Court been crippled, and if so, by whom?
Yes, by internal corruption.
/politics
Not really. More like by its inherent impotence: its decisions are non-enforceable, and therefore null and void for all intents and purposes.
...
And after that statement of the microsoft lawyer infront of a french court, that microsoft cannot guarantee that the US government cannot access data even on EU servers, the last fig-leaf has been torn off this sham called "Privacy shield".
Looks like that is referring to https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/25/microsoft_admits_it_cannot_guarantee/
The whole situation is murky, and if anyone thinks everything is out in the open then I have a bridge to sell them.
Yes, that is what i was referring to.
Of course not everything is out in the open.
But, as far as i know, that was the first time a microsoft representative admitted (had to admit), that user data on european servers is not safe from being accessed by the US government.
I mean it was an open secret anyway for anyone who knows what the Patriot and Cloud Acts are, but Microsoft always denied this possibility before and said the data is safe.
This, and maybe a bit more, that ICC judge that has been put under US sanctions, have opened the eyes of some people in power that this is something that can't be ignored anymore.
time for everyone to switch to linux, etc etc
Yep! Basically every EU based company should go that way. US' PATRIOT and CLOUD act are incompatible with EU law. And with the current political situation it's strongly recommended to become more self-sufficient anyway.
They are incompatible with the spirit of the law.
But they are not incompatible with the actual law, since there is an exception for the US, the so called "Privacy shield". Which boils essentially down to "Trust me, bro".
Privacy Shield was declared invalid in July 2020 by the European Court of Justice (Schrems II) and has been replaced by the Data Privacy Framework which still violates EU law. My guess is that the new framework will be also declared invalid.
Yep! Basically every EU based company should go that way. US' PATRIOT and CLOUD act are incompatible with EU law. And with the current political situation it's strongly recommended to become more self-sufficient anyway.
They are incompatible with the spirit of the law.
But they are not incompatible with the actual law, since there is an exception for the US, the so called "Privacy shield". Which boils essentially down to "Trust me, bro".
Privacy Shield was declared invalid in July 2020 by the European Court of Justice (Schrems II) and has been replaced by the Data Privacy Framework which still violates EU law. My guess is that the new framework will be also declared invalid.
All of which is, of course, more or less irrelevant
European governments and companies are as addicted to American cloud providers as to microsoft windows & office.
I don't believe that will ever change.
The level of corruption is very significant. Of course they are addicted.
Admins and "developers" are addicted to copy pasting stackoverflow, not corrupt, just lazy.
Microsoft/Windows has some unique abilities like document rights management with OS integration. They really want people to use Azure, but Active Directory still works. There is still no comprehensive competition to Windows/Office and there probably won't be until Apple decides to start competing properly.
Kinda silly that they even started in the first place, i mean billion dollar companies couldn't get enough space to install a few servers around the office? No server room? At least they're waking up, better late than never...
"Cloud" seems cheap but seldom ever remains cheap. Most web people really take the concept of "elastic computing" to heart and write absolute garbage code which absolutely eats up cloud credits like child at a confectionary.
I'm guessing airbus will be very happy with the massive cost reduction that they achieved with this move
The original motivation was not a lack of server rooms or competence. For large enterprises the idea behind cloud adoption was economic efficiency: better utilization of hardware and the ability to amortize idle capacity by sharing infrastructure across multiple workloads and tenants.
In practice, however, this only works well for specific use cases. For long-running, predictable, and mission-critical workloads the cloud often turns out to be more expensive, while also introducing additional concerns around reliability, vendor lock-in, compliance, and security. From that perspective, moving core systems back on-prem is not “waking up late”, but a reassessment based on real operational experience rather than marketing promises.
, moving core systems back on-prem is not “waking up late”, but a reassessment based on real operational experience rather than marketing promises.
An "Oops!" is an "Oops!", no matter the reason, excuse, rationale, justification or whatever other "non finger-pointing" word you want to use.
on-prem
There's a lot of options in between public cloud and making your own datacentres or colocating.