As France seeks to reduce its dependence on non-European technology suppliers across the public sector, open-source software is playing an increasingly prominent role.
Among the projects that reflect this trend is Nuage, a file-sharing and storage platform developed by the Ministry of National Education for teachers, administrators and other staff. Aimed at its 1.2 million employees within the Ministry, there are now 400,000 active accounts, with around two-thirds of users accessing the service each week.
Each person is allocated 100GB in storage for documents, PDFs, videos, and images, though the average usage level is around 3GB. Workers can also use the platform to share and co-edit documents with colleagues.
Open source as a model for others
The Ministry’s project is an example of how open-source software used at scale and could serve as a model for other organizations looking to embrace digital sovereignty. Interest in that approach has risen in recent months amid geopolitical and trade tensions, with heightened concerns in Europe that the Trump Administration could suddenly access to certain technologies.
For the French agency, Nuage allows the ministry to retain control over sensitive student-related data stored by teachers, said Benoît Piédallu, national project manager for digital services at the French Ministry of National Education. “We didn’t want this data to go to the US, to Microsoft, to other systems like that. It was important to us to be on premise,” said Piédallu.
Cost is another factor. The Ministry of Education can allocate around 10 euros per user each year for the project, said Piédallu. “My budget for the platform is less than two million [euros] a year, so price is, of course, a big issue in this matter,” he said.
The Ministry for Education’s digital services team is responsible for design and delivery of the Nuage platform, with the work taking place between the initial deployment in 2020 to the final version release in 2022.
“The major challenge about deploying an open-source platform is that we have to do everything [internally],” he said, such as running virtual machines, and installing and configuring Linux Debian. “We need to manage everything on this virtual machine, and, of course, to install and configure Nextcloud on it.”
The Ministry has two dedicated staff members managing the file-storage platform, while another handles the infrastructure. The Nuage platform is hosted at two state-owned data centers: one near Paris, the other in the south of the country near the Pyrenees.
Nuage’s file storage and synchronization features are built on Nextcloud Files, open-source software developed by German vendor Nextcloud. Nuage also includes a document editor app built on Nextcloud Office, which uses Collabora’s open-source software.
User uptake on the upswing
Piédallu said user uptake of the file-storage service is a sign of its success. (A smaller proportion of that 400,000-strong group — 80,000 workers— use the Nuage file sync client on their desktop. Nuage stores 570 million documents with 1.2 petabytes of data.)
This level of adoption has been achieved largely without \ efforts to encourage use internally, said Piédallu. “We didn’t do any major, national communication for our users to start using the service, to make them know they have the opportunity to use 100 gigabyte of backup on this file system,” he said. Even so, adoption continues to rise, with around 40 terabytes more storage required each month to meet demand.
“We have a very linear increase. It is incredible to see that,” said Piédallu.
But with rising storage hardware costs, the Ministry actually hopes to slow the pace of adoption to avoid added infrastructure costs, said Piédallu. “If I do a communication tomorrow it will accelerate usage, and I know that I have a limit in my data center.”
Even without an adoption push, the Ministry forecasts uptake will increase to 600,000 users by the end of this year.
Although the digital services team doesn’t have full visibility into how Nuage has been received, Piédallu said feedback is positive, with the file storage and sync system largely invisible to users and operating well — aside from some bugs around synchronization at times. “They are very happy to use it. They don’t make a comparison to Google Drive or OneDrive…, it’s just working,” he said.
The Collabora-based office application suite has been less well-received, in part because its interface is unfamiliar to many users. “When they want to edit documents, work on a [spreadsheet] or something like that, they want it to be exactly like they are used to — if they have Microsoft Office, they want [it] to work the same, to have the same options,” he said.
Local administrations and school districts are not required to use Nuage; they can choose whether to deploy the platform or rely on proprietary software. Microsoft SharePoint and Office tools are still in use, for instance, though there are no figures available for how many people are using the software. The Ministry pays around 2.5 million euros a year for Windows licenses, for instance, across 50,000 devices for Ministry staff.
Looking toward tech independence
Digital sovereignty has become a growing priority for the Ministry in recent years, and across the French public sector more broadly, said Piédallu.
“A few years ago, free software and digital commons were very important; now, it is sovereignty…, to deploy some tools that are sovereign, and that we can deploy on our side with no ‘kill switch,’ et cetera,” he said. “It is something that in the administration, the French administration, we push, and politicians are pushing.”
Nuage is just one of numerous open-source initiatives under way within the French public sector. Other examples include the introduction of LaSuite, an open-source productivity and collaboration suite developed by France’s Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM). It includes services such as messaging app Tchap and Visio, a video meeting platform. The French government has also set out plans to replace Windows with Linux in parts of the public sector.
Piédallu said other public sector organizations considering open-source software should look to peers that have completed similar projects for guidance. He added that many senior decision-makers overestimate the difficulty of moving away from established technologies.
“Most of the decision people in the hierarchy think that it will be very hard to do. Of course, there is work to do to embrace the change, to help people, to be sure that everything that has been thought about,” said Piédallu. “But at the end, it is possible, it is something that we can do.”