The Bavarian state government wants to introduce cloud services from Microsoft in authorities in the Free State. In the future, state and local authorities will be able to use services such as MS 365, Teams and Copilot. For this purpose, the Finance Ministry is negotiating a “joint contract for the Free State and municipalities” with the American group. This is revealed by a presentation from the ministry, which is not available.
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Bavaria is following the example of pioneers such as Lower Saxony, which also plans to use services from the US group’s public cloud. According to the Bavarian presentation, Microsoft services will gradually only be available from the cloud, putting pressure on the authorities to take action. It is “unprofitable” to discuss data protection and security issues in several places. These questions should therefore be clarified centrally.
Microsoft 365 is also listed in the presentation as a mandatory, centrally provided basic service for local authorities. However, the ministry backtracked on this point when asked by C’T: a decision had not yet been made and “will be coordinated closely with municipal umbrella associations”.
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It is not clear from the presentation when the introduction will begin. Discussions are currently underway between the ministry and the state commissioner for data protection. From their point of view, the “Unbundlinger” is, among other things, “transparency in terms of processing purposes, anonymization of usage data and deletion periods for personal data”. The ministry aims to make contractual amendments with Microsoft on the subject of data protection. Lower Saxony is explicitly mentioned as an example on this point. The ministry is also in discussion with the state office for information security.
The ministry has also formulated a target on the subject of costs: the total cost “should remain within the current license costs”. The presentation mentions communication between authorities as well as between citizens and companies, including citizen consultations via Teams, as application scenarios for cloud services.
No mention of open source
Many data protection advocates criticize the use of Microsoft cloud services in administration. Among other things, the EU data protection official calls the use of Microsoft 365 in the EU Commission unlawful. The German federal government wants to use Microsoft services in a special cloud environment from SAP subsidiary Delos to address data protection concerns. However, it will probably take a few years before the Delos cloud is ready. According to the presentation, a “proof of concept” is underway to use the Delos cloud for personnel management and salary accounting in Bavaria. Further “PoCs” are planned with German cloud operators such as Ionos.
For Microsoft 365 and Teams, Bavaria relies on Microsoft’s public cloud at least for the time being, which is probably cheaper than Delos. The keyword “open source” does not appear in the presentation, so the state government’s interest in the federally funded Microsoft alternative OpenDesk is probably manageable.
Cloud projects are one of the areas of action of the “Future Commission for Digital Bavaria 5.0”, in which the Free State works closely with municipalities. It is also working on other projects, such as the increased use of AI. The creation of a “central IT service provider for municipalities” is also being investigated.
(CWO)
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