Why a gradual move away from US tech is a good idea

For a small business in Cork or a family in Galway, digital sovereignty means not waking up one day to find that your email, documents, or photos are suddenly inaccessible because a foreign leader threatened tariffs or a sanctions list changed overnight, writes Brian Honan

Thu, 29 Jan, 2026 - 00:29

Brian Honan

While many of us, when thinking about sovereignty, tend to think in terms of national borders, flags, and border crossings, we should also consider sovereignty in relation to our digital lives.

So much of our personal and business lives depends on technology, that we need to ensure this dependency does not introduce unnecessary risks and that we can regain control over our digital lives. Over the past year, major outages on some of the large tech platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Cloudflare have shown just how fragile that dependence can be.

When AWS went down, many websites, streaming services, apps and online services simply stopped working. A similar disruption at Microsoft Azure left users and businesses unable to access Microsoft 365, their emails, cloud storage, and other key services they assumed would always be there. Cloudflare’s outage took down thousands of websites around the world.

While at their heart these were technical glitches, they were also reminders of how easily our everyday lives can grind to a halt when a system failure can ripple up through layers of services until it hits you at your screen, at the till, on your phone, or in your inbox. Adding this technical fragility on top of recent transatlantic political tensions, and the picture becomes even more worrying.

Many of us, and indeed many Irish and European organisations rely on American cloud services such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple for email, calendars, and document storage. Yet under American laws such as the CLOUD Act, US authorities can compel US companies to hand over data, even if that data is stored in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU.

During a recent French Senate inquiry into public procurement and European digital sovereignty, Anton Carniaux, the director of public and legal affairs for Microsoft in France, was asked could Microsoft "guarantee our committee, under oath, that data on French citizens could not be transmitted to the American government without the explicit agreement of the French government?” His answer was “No, I cannot guarantee that.”

Access to our data by foreign government agencies is not the only threat to our digital sovereignty. When the US imposed sanctions on the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, Microsoft reportedly cancelled his email account, forcing him and his colleagues to move to a Swiss provider to keep working.

Apple CEO Tim Cook (centre) at the inauguration of US President Donald Trump (right) and US Vice President JD Vance (left) on January 20, 2025. Many of us, and indeed many Irish and European organisations rely on American cloud services such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple for email, calendars, and document storage. File photo: Shawn Thew/AFP

In other cases, Microsoft has been reported to have cut off services to companies linked to Russia and to Chinese organisations after sanctions or trade restrictions, with access to data and services lost almost overnight. Similarly, these sanctions could be aimed at individuals who have been critical of the current US administration.

Should that happen to you, it could result in you not being able to access any of your online services such as email, online shopping with US sites like Amazon, and streaming services not being able to use your credit cards, or even order an Uber. Now combine that kind of political pressure with a tariff row over Greenland and an already fragile dependence on a handful of global platforms, and digital sovereignty is clearly becoming a critical concern for many of us.

This is what "digital sovereignty" is about as defined by the World Economic Forum as “having control over your own digital destiny — the data, hardware and software you rely on and create”.

For the EU, it means making sure European laws and values matter online, and that our critical services are not at the mercy of foreign governments or a small number of giant platforms. For a small business in Cork or a family in Galway, it means not waking up one day to find that your email, documents, or photos are suddenly inaccessible because a foreign leader threatened tariffs, a cloud platform went down, or a sanctions list changed overnight.

The answer

So, what can people do to regain their digital sovereignty? The answer is not to panic, and not to try to cut all ties with American technology at once. These platforms are deeply woven into how we live and work, and many provide excellent services.

The goal is to reduce the risk so that one outage, one legal order, or one tariff decision does not switch off something you or your business relies on. Small, conscious steps can make a big difference.

Moving to European or privacy-focused alternatives for email, file storage, or messaging, and employing open-source alternatives to commercial software such as Libre Office instead of Microsoft Office or Google Workspace. The website European Alternatives lists EU-based alternatives that you could move to.

You should also keep offline back-ups of important photos and documents instead of trusting the cloud, and encrypt any sensitive data you store in the cloud to keep it secure and private.

Some European governments and institutions are already taking steps to control their own Digital Sovereignty. France has just announced that a domestically developed video conferencing platform, Visio, will replace Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other non-European tools across all state administrations by 2027.

The platform has been tested for over a year and already has more than 40,000 regular users. It will be rolled out to 200,000 public servants, saving an estimated €1m per year for every 100,000 users who move off US commercial platforms.

Denmark's Ministry of Digitalisation plans to replace Microsoft Office with the open source alternative LibreOffice and to encourage broader use of the Linux operating system. Austria's armed forces are also migrating from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, with careful planning and staff training to ease the migration.

Mark Zuckerberg (centre), CEO of Meta, at Donald Trump's inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2025. Under American laws such as the CLOUD Act, US authorities can compel US companies to hand over data, even if that data is stored in Ireland or elsewhere in the EU. File photo: Shawn Thew/AFP

After being hit by US sanctions, the International Criminal Court is moving away from Microsoft Office to an open source office suite and a Swiss-based email platform to reduce its exposure to foreign political decisions.

The growing tension over Greenland, tariffs, and the recent outages at AWS, Azure and Cloudflare show issues that start far away can end up impacting our screens and our wallets. We cannot control what foreign leaders decide, or when a major cloud platform fails.

But we can control how vulnerable we are to their decisions and their downtime. By gradually reducing total dependence on a handful of American tech platforms, diversifying providers, and supporting European and opensource alternatives, we can reclaim more control over our own digital future and make sure the next geopolitical row or cloud outage does not take our emails, documents or memories down with it.