Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen Coje_He for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com, Nov. 24 (Xinhua)-- the French Minister of Education and Youth said that schools should not use free versions of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace, reflecting Europe's continuing concern about cloud data sovereignty, competition and privacy rules.

In August, Philippe Latombe, a member of the French National Assembly, told Pap Ndiaye, the minister of education, that the free version of Microsoft Office 365 was attractive but tantamount to illegal dumping. He asked the Secretary of Education what he planned to do given the data sovereignty issues involved in storing personal data in US cloud services.

Last week, the Ministry of Education released a written reply confirming that French public procurement contracts require "remuneration"-payment.

"therefore, the quotation for free services is in principle outside the scope of public procurement," the ministry said in a statement, a position that Minister Pap Ndiaye is said to have confirmed.

This applies to other free services, such as Google Workspace. If paid versions of these cloud services have not been banned because of concerns about data security, they may be an option.

The French authorities believe that Microsoft and Google cloud services that store data in the United States do not comply with European data regulations such as GDPR and "Schrems II", the ruling of the European Court of Justice on cross-border data sharing in 2020.

The "Schrems II" ruling invalidated the US-EU privacy agreement because the European Court of Justice held that US law did not meet European privacy standards.

The "Central Cloud" policy and the May 2021 statement of the National Council on Computing and Freedom (CNIL) recommended that higher education institutions use GDPR-compliant cloud collaboration services and that universities avoid deploying Office 365 or Google Workspace.

German data protection authorities reached a similar conclusion in 2019 that they did not allow Microsoft Office 365 to be used in classrooms in Hesse.

Google did not respond to requests for comment.

Microsoft declined to comment. However, Microsoft announced Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty (sovereign version) in July this year, which will allow public sector customers to use Microsoft's cloud services in a policy-compliant manner.

CTOnews.com learned that Microsoft also plans to deploy its EU Data Boundary by the end of 2022, although EU customer data can be processed in compliance with data regulations. Google took similar steps last year to meet EU data protection requirements.

Last month, the US president signed an executive order instructing US agencies to implement the transatlantic data privacy framework announced in March.

The EU must now take steps to adopt these rules, which may take some time. Once adopted, data transmission between the United States and the European Union should become easier to manage. Microsoft and Google may find it easier to win cloud computing contracts from European governments.

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