IT Essentials: Vive la revolution

Is the French decision to ditch Zoom magnifique or une terrible idée?

The French decision to go sovereign is bold, but could cost them in the long run.

From the very start of the 21st century, one technology has reigned supreme: one tool to bring them all and one tool bind them, if Tolkien will forgive me for the misquote.

It is, of course, the cloud, which enabled unprecedented levels of scale, speed and convenience.

But, as John Leonard wrote this week, convenience has also meant control: specifically lock‑in, geopolitical exposure and spiralling costs.

The UK government, as we’ve written before, seems committed to putting all of its eggs in one foreign basket, but European countries are more willing to make hard decisions and break those ties – while investing healthily into domestic companies, too.

The latest and largest contender is France, which is to bin Microsoft, Google, Cisco and other external videoconferencing tools across government.

This is a big deal, despite being limited in scope for now. France is the first country, rather than federal state or government department, to announce a clean break with overseas providers.

Other comms won’t be far behind videoconferencing: the Suite Numérique programme aims to build a full digital ecosystem that will include sovereign versions of tools like email and instant messaging.

Equally impressive is the commitment to break away from US infrastructure using a sovereign French cloud – admittedly easier to do if you’re already tearing out your old tech root and branch.

The plan has its complications (if sovereignty was easy, everyone would be doing it), including interoperability.

At this point we’ve all been in a meeting where company policies forbid or dictate a video platform nobody else uses (I’m looking at you, Cisco), so we can assume French civil servants will still need some interaction with US tech when talking to external partners.

The other challenge is innovation. Platforms with mass adoption enjoy mass feedback and develop quickly, while those with a small footprint often just iterate. It’s like comparing a Ford to a Trabant P50.

As well as his excellent deep dive into cloud sovereignty - looking at the UK-US relationship and chatting to senior figures at HPE, the Open Cloud Coalition, the Green Party, Co-op and more – John Leonard has published the first insights from our 2026 IT trends research.

To set the scene, we simply asked IT leaders, “Is AI a bubble?” Most believe in the technology, though confidence in the financing, the business model and even current business cases was much more mixed.

In our next article we’ll be looking at how organisations are using AI for coding; how IT leaders see it altering the structure of the workforce; the jobs most likely to be affected; agentic rollouts; and some successful use cases of GenAI.