Dutch colleges and universities seem to store relatively large amounts of data with large American public cloud providers. Almost every university uses at least one cloud environment.

According to researchers TU Delft, University of Vienna and Germany’s Max Planck Institute show that Dutch universities are more likely to store their data with America’s top three public cloud providers than universities in other European countries.

This concerns university data storage in AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure public cloud environments. In the top three surveys, our country is next to the United States itself and the United Kingdom. In other European countries surveyed, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, this is much less.

Dutch universities have connected at least one of their systems (data) to one of the three American public clouds. Between 2015 and 2021, the use of public clouds by Dutch universities has increased sharply, according to the study. This upgrade will even begin before the study period. As a result, usage and growth will be higher than in other European countries.

High usage of email server and learning management system

Dutch universities also use commercial email servers more frequently than their counterparts in other European countries, the study shows. Between 2018 and 2021, in particular, there will be an increase in the use of Microsoft’s email service in our country.

According to the researchers, this may be due to the introduction of the European GDPR legislation. The government does not consider Google to be GDPR compliant, which may have led to a massive migration from Gmail to Microsoft’s e-mail service deemed GDPR compliant.

Another result is that Dutch universities are also major users of the learning management system. This system is not used very often in other European countries, but they are in the US, UK, and therefore the Netherlands. Our country also scores highly for the use of centralized commercial video tools, such as Zoom, Webex, and Adobe Connect.

Warning

The researchers finally came to the conclusion of their report with a number of caveats about the increasing use of America’s public cloud environment. Students, or student privacy, will be at high risk if the data of Dutch universities and other educational institutions is only stored on American servers. Mainly because the use of this public cloud service is widespread.

It can also jeopardize the integrity of education. This is because of the reliance that (Dutch) universities have on the large American public cloud environment. According to international researchers, the costs that universities are now paying for this would be better spent developing and building their own systems for data storage.

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