France’s Ministry of the Interior and its national police force (Gendarmerie) are among the largest institutions in Europe to migrate away from Microsoft services. Over 240,000 users are transitioning from Microsoft 365 to the open-source collaboration suite Nextcloud in 2025.
This migration comes after years of using GendBuntu, a custom Linux distribution. France's pivot proves that massive agencies can lead in cloud computing security without sacrificing usability or efficiency. It also sets a strong national example for open digital infrastructure.
Paris rarely trumpets its IT migrations, yet insiders describe the Ministry of the Interior’s 2024-2025 shift to Nextcloud as “the biggest silent revolution in French public tech since the Carte Vitale.” The seeds were sown in the Gendarmerie’s 2004 decision to adopt OpenOffice, a move that has since saved an estimated €50 million in licence and hardware costs. Fast-forward to 2023: cyber-command flagged that e-mail metadata stored in US-hosted Microsoft 365 could be subpoenaed under the CLOUD Act. A ministerial task-force benchmarked self-hosted platforms and found that Nextcloud—already hardened by the German federal ITZBund—met ISO-27001 and ANSSI SecNumCloud requirements out of the box. A six-month pilot inside Place Beauvau demonstrated frictionless integration with Smart-Card–based login and Blue Force mobile tablets. Crucially, user satisfaction scores rose after teams discovered Collabora Online’s real-time co-authoring matched what they had in Office 365. Full deployment scaled to 240 000 accounts by April 2025, entirely on French datacentres managed by the Interior’s own ops staff. The ministry’s CTO claims that network egress charges alone dropped by €1.2 million annually once Teams video calls moved on-prem. More subtle benefits include faster evidence-chain audits, because investigators can hash-seal files inside the Nextcloud workflow without third-party APIs. Policy-wise, the project has become the showcase for France’s doctrine of “strategic autonomy,” proving that European platforms can satisfy both usability and cloud computing security at national scale.