Other public sector organizations are also looking at federation.
For the European Commission, interoperability is one of the key reasons for using Matrix. The Commission is assessing the technical feasibility of federation across European Union institutions and member states, though no decision has been made on whether to implement it. “Federation, for us, is an unwritten story … At this point there’s no firm decision,” said Gheorghe, with considerations around security and regulations such as the GDPR.
During the Matrix Conference, Edwall participated in a live federation demo that connected Matrix applications at the Commission, France’s DINUM, Sweden’s Försäkringskassan, NATO, and the authority for Germany’s state of Schleswig-Holstein.
This was a proof of concept that highlighted the potential for the federation more broadly across the European public sector.
Such a project is realistic from a technical perspective, said Edwall, as eSam’s work has demonstrated. “It’s only a few firewalls away to France and Germany, so it’s the same approach, the same philosophy. I think the challenge is going to be maybe, first of all, who should interoperate with each other and how open should it be and who is allowed in.”
A longer road to digital sovereignty
Interoperability is a key benefit of the Matrix protocol, said Forrester’s Maisto. “This is a huge differentiator when we talk of enterprise-scale solutions,” he said.
Maisto expects more organizations to adopt open-source sovereign tools, whether as primary or backup communications platforms. “There’s going to be more adoption, there’s going to be more awareness,” he said.
However, any change is likely to be gradual. “This is not a shift that will happen overnight,” he said. For some organizations, this could be a process that starts with a proof of concept, progressing to production deployments alongside proprietary tools, before an eventual full migration.
For those that wish to take this path, there are plenty of challenges to overcome. Not all public and private sector organizations have adequate IT resources to develop missing features or maintain open-source applications, for instance.
Then there are the existing investments in applications such as Teams. Many organizations invested heavily in migrating to cloud communications platforms during the Covid-19 pandemic, with some projects still underway. “If I’m still amortizing the cost of those migrations, those upgrades, those deployments, I’m not going to get started on a €10 million project anew,” Maisto said.
He also pointed out that communications applications are just one part of a larger digital sovereignty challenge for organizations. “If I’m using the Microsoft productivity suite for everything else, how much does it help adding just the communication tool on a sovereign platform?” Maisto said.
“This is not just implementing an alternative to Teams. This is discovering a whole new world in terms of tools that have to be deployed. If we start thinking in these terms, we realize it’s not a shift that we can do overnight.”
Ensuring communications systems can continue operating is an important part of business continuity and makes sense for organizations to address, said Maisto. “It’s a great place to start. Just be mindful that if you start there, there might be a lot more to consider very soon.”