Dutch tax office abandons Microsoft 365 to run its email on its own servers

The Dutch tax authority has abandoned its move to Microsoft‘s cloud office suite and will run its email, calendars and office tools on servers it owns or controls, backed by European open source software. The Belastingdienst, together with the Dutch customs service and the agency that pays out benefits, was supposed to work inside Microsoft’s public cloud, on Outlook, Teams and the online Office apps. Now the institution that holds the financial records of every Dutch taxpayer is pulling that work back onto its own hardware.

The trigger was a verdict from the government’s own IT watchdog. The Advisory Council on ICT Assessment concluded that the public-cloud design “falls short on information security, information processing and future-proofing,” as The Register reported. Its list of problems reads like a checklist any organisation on Microsoft’s cloud could run against itself: confidential documents passing through American servers, and standard…