Independence from the cloud, M365 and co. – how to take the right steps now

Political influences or not – resilience and the cloud know no legislative periods

In 2025, we are seeing how the change of residents in the White House is leading to a sharp increase in concerns between the big players in IT and their users worldwide. Now that everything seems to be running via Microsoft 365 and the daily office routine of thousands of people would come to a complete standstill without Teams, everyone wants to know what the alternative could be. The fact that US authorities have the power to intervene has been known in the mainstream since the ECJ ruling of 2020: Everyone had to be aware that, if push came to shove, the parent companies from overseas would also tap their EU subsidiaries in Ireland and that adequacy decisions would not change that. You don’t need a law degree or special insights to understand this, because even the No. 1 driver of EU data protection in person, Max Schrems, repeatedly and surprisingly easily speaks openly about what is actually going on.

So we have to admit that everyone must have known, at least half-heartedly: Okay, whether it’s Biden or Trump – US cloud and all data with one large provider, somehow it has an aftertaste. Whatsapp, Google, X: In the end, everyone joins in because everyone else is doing it. But no one is 100% sure, from the point of view of an EU citizen, mind you. Why is that – and how can you, as a non-IT professional, non-lawyer and normal user, become more independent?

Inventory, reflection, tidying up – what do you use IT and clouds for?

Unfortunately, there is still no manifested basic knowledge on the subject of data and IT, in the way that spelling, mathematics or history are taught at school. This is actually surprising in 2025: spelling and mathematics in particular are domains that run completely IT-supported in the well-known office products and demonstrate extremely high accuracy. As a result, many people have only heard a little about data backup at best, and only have to experience for themselves what the saying ‘No backup? No pity!’ means. Often it is only this moment that provides the impetus to deal with what is going on behind the screen and deep in the IT.

Everyone can take easy steps, starting with the simplest areas: almost everyone has Office documents – Word, Excel, Powerpoint. And almost everyone has used the ‘My Documents’ or ‘Documents’ folder on their PC at some point – but have they backed them up? For Mac users, this is where things can get dangerous, because they simply search for documents using the ‘Finder’, but rarely know where they are stored in detail. However, this is precisely what is important: you should know where the documents and files are located and consciously use the folder structure below them. The advantage of this is that if you back up this location, e.g. on an external hard drive, you can be sure that your Office documents are safe. The actual Office applications are still to be considered: Office 2024 is the last offline purchase version of the well-known Word-Excel-Powerpoint-etc. range from Microsoft, but it already has some limitations. The Publisher application is at end of life, and many users are already looking surprised. Those who already use open-source solutions such as LibreOffice or simply have it installed alongside can breathe a sigh of relief – because it can be used to view and edit many of the file formats that are no longer supported in the mainstream product of the big software giant.

Second important point: photos – almost everyone takes pictures with their smartphone and generates thousands of snapshots per year. But if you ask where these pictures are stored in the device’s file system, most amateur photographers will just shrug their shoulders. And no, ‘in the gallery’ is not the right answer! Hot tip: DCIM. This is almost always the folder in which a structure exists under which the mobile phone camera also stores its images. And, you guessed it: because hardly anyone knows this location, it is almost never backed up. The mobile phone breaks, and the frustration over the lost holiday pictures is great. Unless, of course, you store all your photos with a cloud provider, which is what many people do.

The third example is more complicated – email and messaging services. There are numerous possibilities here, so numerous that they cannot be explained here as easily as in the previous examples. At least most messaging services now offer a backup option that you should have looked at. When it comes to email, the question of independence is quite individual – if you use the common freemail services, at least you have your data not only on your phone but also with the provider. But it is precisely this provider that we want to become independent of. Is that even possible? Secure and independent? What file format does an email actually have – wait a minute: and my calendar?

Fast movers and data rotation – understanding warehousing and capacity management

The most relevant consideration is: Which data is a fast-moving item – and what actually belongs in the archive? Bonus question: What are worthless notes that aren’t even worth saving? Because the tendency to be a data hoarder is becoming more and more pronounced today, when storage space is usually available in abundance.

To get a grip on this issue, you should first check which stereotype best describes you – or even several at once:

1. The Whatsapp user. This archetype panics when there are no new messages in the messenger. Everything goes through this – club, friends, parents. Email? Not so important. Office documents? Oh dear. Perhaps an unloved CV every few years, or an Excel file for tax purposes. So these users should pay particular attention to data that changes quickly and make sure that messenger information is quickly available again in the event of a defective mobile phone. Because you can get a new device at an electronics store, even if it’s just a simple model that you get on a temporary basis. If the word data backup gives you the creeps, you should also pick up a USB stick that matches your mobile phone in the same store. Without making a recommendation for such easily lost and often unencrypted media: at least you can do more with it than nothing.
2. The office tiger. Messengers are nice, but many business-focused users don’t care if their data is lost. They exchange information with friends, but in the end, the chats are not that important. If necessary, they will simply be out of the loop for a few days while the next evening of bowling is being organised, and the world will not end. But woe betide if the Office documents are no longer there or the cost estimate from the previous day has not been saved. That would be a disaster! Invoices, correspondence, accounting and presentations are everything that matters. The same goes for emails: if Outlook is dead, then there is sheer panic. Where are the emails actually stored? Okay, this is where things get more complicated, because very few people know.

We’ll stop at this point: every user archetype has at least one pot of data that is constantly and, above all, rapidly changing, without which nothing works in everyday life and which, in the event of data loss, can get really tight. It is precisely this data that should be the first to be dealt with if you want to become independent of one of the major providers and be your own boss when it comes to information.

Examples: Away from the big cloud providers, towards your own resilience

The topic of messengers is actually quite easy to deal with – because alternatives to Whatsapp are now widely available. Threema and Signal are not only popular and offer more or less the same range of functions, but also allow for offline data backup. This means that you are no longer dependent on a typical Whatsapp backup on Google Drive, which recently even made negative headlines.

Most users store their office documents on their hard drives. Even if these are often backed up in the cloud using OneDrive, Dropbox or other solutions, they are still available offline. For applications, there are tried and tested suites such as LibreOffice or OpenOffice. These office suites are free and offer 90% of what you would expect from Microsoft Office. So if you regularly back up your data and want to work without software from the USA, it’s not that difficult. Some users are now even forced to do so – because of the aforementioned discontinuation of Publisher, many users have to resort to the open-source office suites mentioned above in order to be able to open their files at all. To back up data without a cloud provider, you can use a network-attached storage (NAS) device, which is more or less a hard drive that can be accessed via your home network and thus also via Wi-Fi. But you can increase security even without such a local mini-server: in addition to space for websites and email services, numerous providers offer storage space on German servers. This can be integrated into Windows or a mobile phone and kept up to date with free sync apps. Sound like the cloud? But it is in fact what was already available in the 1990s: local hosting in a data centre, like a remotely stored hard drive.

In the context of email, too, you should look into what local hosting providers have to offer. Even if it may be a little complicated: understanding what a mail server, an IMAP mailbox, a webmailer and, above all, the difference between M365 with Outlook and a hosted Exchange mailbox makes all the difference in terms of real freedom of choice and resilience in the age of electronic mail. Just as we usually know that Office documents are stored on the hard drive, we should also learn to understand the way email works. After all, resilience means being prepared for change and being able to react so that influences have less impact.
Unfortunately, however, it is often not even known that the Outlook and Exchange Server options, which are mostly known from the professional environment, can also be used privately or in smaller companies. Microsoft Exchange is the server application that most users never see: it is the central brain for email, contacts, calendars and notes, which feeds the well-known Office program Outlook with data. This technology is used by almost every company and, with the breakthrough of Microsoft 365, is also available in the cloud. A mailbox on an Exchange server, like any other mailbox with a provider, receives emails even if you ‘don’t have Outlook open’. A special feature is the synchronisation of emails, but also contacts, calendars and notes, with your mobile phone. This means that you always have the latest data – regardless of the device you are using – and there is also a web interface for use in a browser called OWA. The difference between this and Microsoft 365 is that Hosted Exchange is operated locally in a data centre by a German provider as a separate offering with no connection to the Microsoft cloud. This means that you have to do without the convenience of M365, where much more is interlinked – OneDrive, files, Office applications. With a German Hosted Exchange offering, you only get email, calendar, contacts and notes. So: Outlook and what’s behind it, but nothing more. Whether you opt for a provider with a licence for the Outlook application or still use Microsoft Office is up to you. In any case, the use of Outlook as an installed application is recommended, but it is not absolutely necessary. The rest of the Office world has to be installed as described using Office purchase software or a free Office solution. It is therefore easy to see why the full integration of M365 with the rest of the Office programs and their use in the browser is considered practical and popular because everything is always online and (almost) always available. However, if M365 were to fail or be blocked, the scenario that all IT managers are currently talking about would arise. Companies are increasingly flirting with dedicated Exchange Server offers hosted in Germany: if a provider goes out of business, it’s just as easy to find a new provider as it is to find new storage space for Office files. Hosted Exchange is the same product with almost all providers, and since in the case of a local Outlook installation you usually have a local copy of the contents of the mailbox on the computer, it is quite easy to take all the data to a new mailbox and provider using Outlook’s own import/export function.

Conclusion: Know your data, manage your stuff – resilience away from clouds is possible!

Not everyone will have read the above topics with a nod and be able to make a direct change. Much of it sounds new and very technical, and we should be honest: Of course it is much easier, less complicated and less time-consuming to simply move completely in the universe of Gmail and the same Office suite, Microsoft 365 and Whatsapp. No one is forced to deal with the issues and their granularity as explained here – but everyone is expressly invited to question their own dependency and to take a few steps to prevent what everyone is now warning against: that one day we will no longer be able to avoid making ourselves dependent on the big tech giants. The more modularly you understand your own IT environment and manage its architecture, the more flexible you are in selecting dedicated service providers.

The trend in this direction has been unbroken since this year – which of course also brings providers onto the scene, offering far more than just the services described here. Collaboration and office solutions such as Nextcloud, kSuite and others are flooding into the market and want to ride this wave, offering a European Office Online à la M365, so to speak. There are more and more customers willing to switch, and hardly any of them want to move away from the convenience of the big providers like Microsoft 365. Especially not at the corporate level, where people were happy not to have to cram their own data centre as full as it used to be and to be able to do without the appropriate personnel to run it. In the light of current world events, this is becoming the fever dream of risk managers – and at the same time an opportunity to become more resilient in the long term. It remains to be seen whether the new protagonists here are just a copy of Made in the USA or a genuine Swiss army knife – in the end, it is up to each individual to decide which services to choose.

Philipp Schneidenbach

Philipp Schneidenbach ist Experte auf den Gebieten Enterprise Architecture, Governance, Risk und Compliance. In seiner derzeitigen Position bei Materna vereint er die Erfahrung aus mehr als 25 Jahren Beratung und Linienverantwortung in verschiedenen Industriezweigen und Märkten. Als Autor, Researcher und Speaker engagiert er sich unter anderem in Organisationen und Berufsverbänden wie der IEEE, ISACA und MoreThanDigital.