Blogs

Three companies—Google, Amazon and Microsoft—together account for 70% of the European cloud market. European providers each hold a market share of approximately 2%. This is more than just a market statistic. It reflects a balance of power that directly affects who can, in practice, access the data held by Dutch public sector organisations and which laws govern that access. The Dutch government has decided that this needs to change. In a memorandum published in June 2026, the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations’ NDS Cloud Programme explains how the government intends to build its own sovereign cloud service. The document is concrete in its approach, setting out a timeline, a selected scenario, a technical strategy and an honest acknowledgement of the challenges involved.

The Enterprise Chamber of the Amsterdam Court of Appeal (the “Enterprise Chamber”) delivered its ruling on 28 April 2026 in a case brought by the Temporary Works Council (the “TOR”) of the Identification and Screening of Asylum Seekers Service (Dienst Identificatie en Screening Asielzoekers, “DISA”) (ECLI:NL:GHAMS:2026:1105). The Enterprise Chamber ruled that the TOR had no right to be consulted on the decision to treat the reorganisations at DISA and the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) as separate processes, without transferring personnel between them. According to the Enterprise Chamber, the decision concerned the allocation of public-law responsibilities between government services and therefore fell within the scope of the political primacy principle set out in Article 46d of the Dutch Works Councils Act (Wet op de ondernemingsraden, or WOR). Notably, however, the Enterprise Chamber described the decision-making process as “highly careless”. This finding did not lead to a different legal conclusion.

Anyone who has followed the media recently will have noticed the same debate recurring: should employees be required to come into the office more often? The term “camel hunting” regularly comes up in this context. Employers are seeking to avoid a working week with two distinct “humps”, characterised by busy Tuesdays and Thursdays and near-empty offices on the other days.

An employee calls in sick, stating that even minor exertion leaves her exhausted. Two weeks later, she takes part in an intensive HYROX competition. Her employer loses confidence in her and summarily dismisses her. The subdistrict court rules that the dismissal was justified.

At the beginning of September, the Dutch government indicated that implementing the new pay transparency rules by 1 January 2027 would be feasible. That date now appears less certain. According to the Dutch House of Representatives’ current schedule, the bill is not due to be debated in plenary until the second week of 2027. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate will then still need to consider the proposal. As a result, entry into force on 1 January 2027 no longer appears likely.

In our previous blog post, we discussed vendor lock-in and contractual safeguards. However, contractual protections only work if you still have freedom of choice when signing the agreement. That freedom begins with the procurement process: the point at which a public contracting authority decides what to purchase and from whom. The question, then, is whether procurement law allows digital sovereignty to be taken into account when awarding IT contracts. The answer is yes - and there is more scope to do so than many contracting authorities realise.

Your best-performing executive may also be your biggest people risk. The numbers are excellent. Targets are being met. The business is growing. But people keep leaving the executive's team. HR receives informal concerns about leadership style. Employees say they do not feel comfortable speaking up. There is no formal complaint. No investigation. No established misconduct. So when should the board become concerned?

Imagine that you have worked with the same supplier for years for your cloud environment, email, document management and meeting platform. One day, that supplier decides to significantly increase its prices. Or a situation arises — a takeover or a geopolitical conflict, for example — that suddenly puts the continuity of your systems at risk. You decide to switch providers. And then you discover that, in practice, you cannot. Not really. Your data is locked into proprietary formats, your employees are unfamiliar with any alternative, and the exit costs are astronomical. This is vendor lock-in. And it is not a theoretical risk: it is the daily reality for virtually every organisation that relies on major technology providers.

Virtually every organisation has internal policies and rules. These may include a code of conduct, an absence management policy, a complaints procedure, a remote working policy, and rules on privacy and social media. Such policies provide employees with clarity and help employers mitigate risks. However, more policies do not automatically mean better policies.