🇩🇰 8. Denmark – Government Sets 2026 Exit Date
The Danish government recently announced it will phase out Microsoft software by 2026, starting with a shift to Linux and LibreOffice on public-sector desktops. Major cities like Copenhagen and Aarhus are already moving government services to EU-based clouds.
This marks a landmark national pivot toward open-source infrastructure. Denmark's focus is not just sovereignty—but achieving cloud computing security without relying on U.S. cloud providers.
Contradictory headlines aside, Denmark’s Ministry of Digital Affairs is executing a carefully staged divorce from Microsoft. Phase 1 (June–November 2025) swaps Office 365 for LibreOffice on every desktop—around 12 000 seats—while retaining Windows. Phase 2, pencilled for late 2026, evaluates Linux as the default OS if pilot departments hit usability KPIs. Denmark’s motivation is “digital handlebar freedom,” in minister Caroline Stage Olsen’s words: the capacity to steer public infrastructure without vendor permission. Early estimates suggest licence savings of DKK 42 million over five years, but officials stress resilience. By hosting Nextcloud in Copenhagen’s municipal datacentre, latency for shared-drive access dropped 35 percent, and nightly backups replicate to Aarhus over dedicated fibre, keeping citizen records inside Danish jurisdiction. The ministry has also negotiated an exit clause with Microsoft that waives audit penalties during migration—a precedent other EU buyers are watching closely. Security auditors from the National Cyber Security Centre are embedding with the LibreOffice community to patch Danish-language spell-checking modules, illustrating the blend of local stewardship and global collaboration that underpins robust cloud computing security. Critics note that Windows remains, but officials frame Phase 1 as “decoupling the stack in manageable layers” rather than a leap into the unknown. If the experiment works, Denmark could become the first Nordic state to run an all-open desktop—proving that sovereignty can be iterative, not abrupt.
