ODC-Noord: Building blocks for an existing government cloud

How did a small team in the east of the Netherlands (Groningen) from the Government Datacenter North (ODC-Noord) grow into a supplier of crucial building blocks for the Netherlands digital government strategy? Jaap Jansma, Manager of ODC-Noord, and Marcel Timmer, Country Director Netherlands at Red Hat, explain.

ODC-Noord implements, manages, and operates as a scalable, sovereign cloud service for the Dutch government, and Red Hat provides the fundamental open source software. Together, the 2 companies look at what’s needed to continue fulfilling this role within the government, ranging from scalability and digital sovereignty to security-rich AI development within the central government.

ODC-Noord was established in 2012 as part of the Compacte Rijksdienst (Compact Central Government) program, which aimed to reduce the number of central government datacenters from 65 to 4. In Groningen, a small team saw an opportunity to do this both more efficiently and in a way that prepares ODC-Noord for the future. Today, the result is much more than a technical platform. ODC-Noord forms an important foundation for the digital government and, consequently, public service delivery.

“At the time, we received a request from the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science (OCW) asking if we could deliver a platform for their application landscape,” says Jansma. “That was the moment to build a platform based on open source that we could offer not only to OCW, but also to other parties within the central government.”

In 2016, ODC-Noord's community cloud went live as a standardized Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform. A container platform based on Red Hat OpenShift followed in 2018. Today, ODC-Noord serves 48 different organizations across 11 ministries in the Netherlands.

Generic services: Less customization, more efficiency 

ODC-Noord delivers generic, scalable, and standardized services, thereby contributing to an efficient government, says Jansma. “We want to move away from unnecessary customization and duplicate work. By having multiple parties use the same solution, we create economies of scale. As a result, one of our core rates has been more than halved.”

This approach also affects the way collaboration happens within central government IT. ODC-Noord delivers efficient platform services, but customers need more, such as digital workspaces, application development, and functional management. “You can be complementary within the government there and actively seek out collaboration,” says Jansma. “We want to prevent the same thing from being built multiple times across different datacenters.”

ODC-Noord started as a greenfield, without legacy systems or personnel. This provided room for an innovative start. But the question remains: How do you retain that innovative power and stay attractive in a tight labor market?

For many IT professionals, purpose is weighing increasingly heavily, Timmer notes. “It's special to be able to say that you're contributing to one of the building blocks of a sovereign cloud for the government. You're not working on yet another consumer app, but on infrastructure that affects a large part of the public sector.”

A sovereign cloud on an open source foundation

Digital sovereignty is a central theme in the public sector. From the start, ODC-Noord chose open source as its strategic foundation. The infrastructure runs on Dutch soil under the responsibility of civil servants. This intentionally addresses a major part of the sovereignty puzzle.

“We strive for the highest possible degree of digital sovereignty,” says Jansma. “By deploying open source, hosting in the Netherlands, and working with our own people, we maintain control.” The platform complies with relevant security standards and BIO frameworks. The BIO (Baseline Informatiebeveiliging Overheid) is the mandatory information security standard for all government organizations. A new BIO 2 certification is currently in its final stages.

“Dependencies will always exist,” says Timmer. “However, with open source the control remains entirely in your hands. You are never locked in. Even without Red Hat, you can continue using the software, giving the government true technological independence. Sovereignty is whether you have control over your software and hardware. Can you, if worst comes to worst, migrate to another environment within a limited timeframe? That is the benchmark we are setting with ODC-Noord.”

Planning for security-first AI within the National Digitalization Strategy 

Alongside an IaaS platform for virtual machines (VMs)—enabling multiple operating systems to run on a single physical server—and a container platform, ODC-Noord is working on the next logical step: an AI platform tailored to the needs of the central government. Demand from clients is growing rapidly.

“On one hand, we host enterprise applications on our VM platform; on the other, modern, cloud-native apps on containers,” says Jansma. “On top of that, a clear need is now emerging for an AI development platform. This must be secure, manageable, and fit within the frameworks of the central government, our National Digitalization Strategy [NDS], and the [Artificial Intelligence Act EU].”

AI requires different building blocks than traditional workloads. “For AI, you need accelerators, GPUs [graphics processing units], and LLMs [large language models],” Timmer explains. “With this shared platform, it fundamentally doesn't matter which GPUs or LLMs you want to use. What matters more is having control, transparency, and clear guardrails within a private environment. This allows government organizations to experiment and scale up with AI faster and more securely.”

The foundation—the "toolbox," as Jansma calls it—lies in the infrastructure ODC-Noord has already built: a modern, open source configuration where AI services can land in a controlled manner.

Growth limits and scarce resources

In practice, ambitions surrounding AI run into physical limitations. “Just like everyone else, we are facing hardware shortages,” Jansma points out. “Can we secure the GPUs we need? And how do we deal with the energy network congestion?” In parts of the Netherlands, datacenters compete with other societal needs—such as households wishing to connect home batteries—for capacity on the electricity grid.

"It would be beneficial if the status of datacenters as infrastructure kept pace with the government's digital ambitions," says Timmer. "That is an issue requiring further coordination."

“Furthermore, it is difficult to determine exactly how much capacity will be needed in advance. We have to discover a lot of this through trial and error,” Jansma adds. “A client procures a platform from us and deploys a model. Only then do you see how much capacity it actually demands. This is precisely why it makes sense to concentrate scarce resources. Not every government organization needs to purchase and manage its own GPU clusters. By investing jointly in a shared foundation, more parties can benefit, and waste is prevented.”

National Digitalization Strategy: Build on what you have

Within the digitalization strategy, the cloud priority revolves around a coherent cloud strategy for the central government. Jansma sees a clear role for ODC-Noord here. “What the NDS aims to achieve, we can already deliver to a large extent. We have an IaaS layer and a container platform. At its core, that is a very strong proposition for a sovereign cloud for the government.”

Timmer observes the same pattern. “There are countless initiatives in the Netherlands. It's good that they exist, but people should look in their own backyard first. A large portion of what you want to have in the long run is already running at ODC-Noord. Use those existing investments and ways of working as a springboard.”

The core message: A sovereign cloud for the government already exists

Both Jansma and Timmer emphasize that the public sector often underestimates what’s already available.

“It would be great if people better understood that a form of cloud already exists within the [Dutch] government,” says Jansma. “A cloud that is highly sovereign, possesses significant innovative power, and is already being utilized by dozens of organizations.”

Timmer summarizes: “There is already a sovereign cloud for the [Dutch] government. Collaborate—both within the government and with the market—and make use of what is already there. ODC-Noord is a front-runner in this regard, with a number of building blocks already in place. It is a waste to keep starting over from scratch.”