Despite the government’s desire to gain its digital independence, the Ministry of the Armed Forces will place a new order for solutions from the American giant in a month.
Recent government calls for digital sovereignty will do nothing. The Ministry of the Armed Forces is preparing to place a new order for Microsoft solutions. Initially scheduled for the end of May 2026, the signing of the contract with the Union of Public Purchasing Groups (Ugap), which serves as an intermediary in the supply of Microsoft solutions, was postponed by one month. It will take place at the end of June, according to three people familiar with the matter. “It is certain that the contract will be signed, there is no doubt,” insists one of them.
“Find arguments”
“Given the political tempo, postponing the signature for a month allows more time to find arguments that justify this new order,” confides one of our interlocutors.
And for good reason. Several recent measures have been adopted to detoxify the Ministry of the Armed Forces from Microsoft. In January 2026, a decision was made to release one million euros over one year to deploy La Suite Numérique within the Ministry of the Armed Forces. This includes collaborative tools such as Tchap instant messaging, or an AI assistant developed with Mistral AI. And on April 8, during a seminar led by the interministerial digital department (Dinum), all ministries were invited to formalize a plan to reduce digital dependencies by autumn 2026.
However, the duration of this contract will be reduced, according to two of our interlocutors. Initially planned for five years, it would be reduced to three years. Three years during which the ministry will study how to leave Microsoft. “Currently, there is in fact an instruction within the Ministry of the Armed Forces to analyze how we can get out of dependence on Microsoft,” assures one of our interlocutors familiar with the ongoing debates on controlling digital dependencies within the ministry. “This reduction in the duration of the contract also makes it possible to better justify this decision from a political communication point of view.” In short: it aims to satisfy current political discourse in favor of digital sovereignty.
According to our information, the Minister of the Armed Forces, Catherine Vautrin, has also ordered a report from the Defense Digital Commission (CND) to find out about credible digital alternatives to Microsoft. Carried out with the help of a French digital transformation consulting firm and presented internally on Friday May 22, 2026, this report concludes that the Ministry of the Armed Forces is currently unable to do without Microsoft solutions, according to one of our interlocutors.
The fear of connecting to Azure
Currently, the Ministry of the Armed Forces uses the Microsoft operating system, interfaces and applications in on-premise mode, that is to say hosted internally. Problem: Microsoft tends more and more to want to connect its applications to Azure, its cloud computing platform: “Our real problem is to convince Microsoft to continue on-premise, because we know that, little by little, they will want to connect at least certain services to Azure. And if they do, we will have to leave them. I think that will happen. Today, for example, Teams only works connected to Azure”.
Another threat: in the event of a digital kill switch, namely the interruption of the operation of certain digital services by the American administration, the Microsoft applications used by the Ministry of the Armed Forces would no longer benefit from the updates necessary for their use.
“But, currently, it is complicated to exit Microsoft, explains one of our contacts. There are 200,000 workstations on the network of the Ministry of the Armed Forces, Intradef. All the servers are currently running on the Microsoft operating system. If we wanted to exit, we would have to reconfigure all the servers, reinstall all the applications, etc. In short, make a huge migration plan. We know we can do it, but it’s a huge job.” See you in three years.
