Most organizations did not lose control of their digital workplace through one bad decision. It crept in. First email moved to the cloud, then the files, then the license bundle that kept growing and kept costing more. Today, an American vendor decides where your data lives, what you pay and which tools your team uses. Cancelling does not feel like an option, because everything is tied together.
That is starting to shift. In this article we explain why organizations are moving now, what “taking back control” means in practice and how we at BlazeForce guide that transition.
Why now? Three reasons organizations are taking action
Geopolitical dependency. Data held by an American cloud vendor falls under American legislation, such as the Cloud Act, even when that data sits in a European datacenter. For governments, healthcare and education this is no longer a theoretical risk. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein has phased out Microsoft software almost entirely for its civil servants, police officers and judges, and the Danish national government is following a similar path.
Costs you have no grip on. Microsoft raised its prices sharply in recent years, with increases of up to around 40 percent, and keeps rearranging its product portfolio. If you are locked into the ecosystem, you pay what is asked. That is not an accusation against Microsoft, it is the logic of vendor lock-in.
Privacy and compliance. The GDPR requires you to account for where personal data is stored and who can access it. With data under foreign jurisdiction, that story becomes harder and harder to tell.
The result shows in the numbers: Nextcloud has reported a tripling of demand since early 2025 and more than 50 percent growth, with millions of new enterprise users. The topic is alive in the Netherlands too. At the Nextcloud Enterprise Day in Utrecht this spring, the spotlight was on Dutch schools and municipalities actively working towards digital sovereignty.
Taking back control is a direction, not a big bang
This is where things often go wrong. Organizations treat the move as an all-or-nothing decision, and therefore postpone it indefinitely. In reality it is a dot on the horizon that you work towards in steps.
A realistic path looks roughly like this. You start with insight: which data and processes live where, and which dependencies really matter? Then you decide what can move first. File storage and document collaboration are usually the logical starting point, because Nextcloud is mature and proven there. Areas where Microsoft is still clearly stronger, such as large video meetings in Teams, you leave in place for now. A hybrid setup is not a compromise, for most organizations it is the sensible arrangement for years. There is a reason Nextcloud publishes its own whitepaper on combining Microsoft and Nextcloud.
What Nextcloud can and cannot do functionally, we described earlier in our article Nextcloud as a Microsoft 365 alternative: an honest story. This piece is about the question behind it: how do you get there?
How BlazeForce helps: guidance, not hosting
To be clear: we are not a hosting provider and do not want to become one. Nextcloud hosting is a mature market with specialized European providers, and with your own IT you can also run it yourself. Our role sits before and around that:
We help you define the dot on the horizon: what do you want under your own control, what can stay with a vendor, and in which order do you tackle it. We carry out the migration, from file structures and permissions to the integrations with systems that remain. And we make sure it works for the people who use it every day, because a technically successful migration without adoption is still a failed project.
We are not writing this from theory
BlazeForce runs on Nextcloud itself. We create and edit our documents in Nextcloud Office, and we no longer need a Microsoft Office license. The leads that come in through our website land directly in our own environment via an integration between WordPress and Nextcloud, where we follow them up. No external CRM, no data leaving the building.
That is the scale of a small company, not a municipality with thousands of workplaces. But it shows that it works: a digital workplace where you decide where your data lives, without compromising daily work.
Where do you stand?
Want to know what is realistic in your situation, what can move first and what is better left in place for now? Get in touch. Together we will map out where you are dependent today and what the route to more control looks like.
