Michael Kromer
Michael Kromer is an IT architect and CTO at grommunio. Since 1998, he has been developing security and communications solutions for companies, government agencies, and critical infrastructure (e.g., intelligence services and the military). As a self-proclaimed nerd when it comes to firewalls, Linux, BSD, TCP/IP—and pretty much anything that contains at least one ESP32—he explains complex technical topics in an easy-to-understand, practical way and spices up his explanations with (sometimes bad ;)) humor.
Sessions
Digital sovereignty is often reduced to data residency, European hosting or the use of open-source software. In defense and intelligence environments, that definition is not sufficient.
For organisations whose communications must remain available during political conflict, supply-chain disruption, network isolation or the failure of a trusted vendor, sovereignty becomes an operational requirement: Can the organisation continue to communicate when external dependencies are no longer available - or no longer trustworthy?
Drawing on anonymized examples from customer projects in the military and intelligence sector, this talk examines what digital sovereignty looks like under real operational pressure. It explores architectural control, disconnected and restricted environments, identity ownership, software supply chains, update sovereignty, protocol compatibility and the ability to replace a vendor without replacing every client and workflow at the same time.
The central lesson is simple:
Digital sovereignty is not where a system is hosted. It is the ability to understand it, operate it, secure it and continue without permission from a third party.
In this workshop, Michael Kromer, CTO of grommunio will show (and explain) how to setup a grommunio from scratch in just 90 Minutes to be a full Microsoft Exchange replacement.