A new contract with "Microsoft" for the state administration is coming. Against the backdrop of the central political events and the great communication noise, the decision of the Council of Ministers to assign the Minister of Electronic Governance to conduct a public procurement for "Microsoft" products remained in the background. This was written by the deputy chairman of the PG of "Continuing Change-Democratic Bulgaria" (PP-DB) and co-chairman of "Yes, Bulgaria" Bozhidar Bojanov on Facebook.
Bozhanov specifies that the state administration uses many "Microsoft" products, the licensing and support of which he must arrange - Windows Server, SQL Server, etc. This is not the office suite and even if we have technological disputes about Windows vs Linux and the best choice for database systems, the need for support is undeniable. He adds that "Microsoft" is a company with a good reputation and large and competent partner networks, which provides sufficient guarantees for the administration that it will not be left to fend for itself, which it cannot, according to him.
Bozhanov also says that "Microsoft" has been offering Office365 for many years - a cloud office, where Word, Excel and PowerPoint continue to work locally, but also have sharing and collaboration functionalities, which in turn require cloud integration. It also offers centralized email management. "I have been a customer of Office365 in the private sector and it saves a lot of headaches and imposes a lot of good practices, including in relation to cybersecurity. I also had a negative experience with support in India, which for a month could not understand what I was asking them and finally admitted that they had a bug, but the net result is undoubtedly positive,“ he also wrote.
According to Bozanov, however, "Microsoft" requires all user accounts to be in the cloud active directory (AzureAD/Entra). He explains that this means that the entire state administration must be managed in the "Microsoft" cloud. Another problem is data - Microsoft did not offer governments the opportunity to fully control the keys for data encryption, which meant that Microsoft theoretically had access to all data, Bozanov added.
In his post, Bozanov says that in 2022, as a minister, he raised these issues as a problem for Bulgaria, because from the point of view of national security and sovereignty, it is a long-term risk to give so much control to a third-party company. Since then, "Microsoft" introduced more options for encrypting data from governments - in 2025 they introduced support for hybrid environments with state infrastructure, which is a step in the right direction, he points out.
„Against this background, however, comes the problem with the International Criminal Court in The Hague. After US President Donald Trump sanctioned the court in The Hague, access to the email (in Office365) of the Prosecutor General to the court was suspended. Microsoft first did not comment, and then denied that they had done anything wrong. But whatever the real situation, the US administration has the tools to impose certain actions on American technology companies“, Bozanov also writes.
According to him, the long-term binding of the state to an external provider of such central services, without the ability and preparation for migration within hours, is quite risky. Both from the point of view of data access and from the point of view of service availability - if someone can stop access to a key service from one day to the next for political reasons, this is a problem, adds Bozhanov.
He gives the example of Germany, which has realized this problem, which is why it created the Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDIS), which develops products that the German administration uses and through which it does not depend on external suppliers. After the above-described incident, the International Criminal Court in The Hague migrated from Office365 to ZenDIS's openDesk, which is completely open source.
Bozhanov specifies that this is not an accusation against American companies. “It's not that I don't have technological criticisms of them, but they provide good products that, unfortunately, no European company has been able to develop and impose to such an extent. "From the perspective of long-term risks and the new situation in which the partnership between the US and Europe is being questioned by the White House, we should also carefully evaluate our technological solutions," he added.
Bozhanov also says that the Council of Ministers' decision states "or equivalent", which allows the MEU to separate the support of existing server products from the office suite and consider open alternatives that would guarantee digital sovereignty.