To avoid the use of foreign and private transfer solutions, the Government has set up France Transfert, a service reserved for State agents who wish to share large and non-sensitive files via the Internet.
Share via the Internet up to 20 GB of data (2 GB per file) to a maximum of 100 recipients: this is what you can do France transfer, a service reserved for State civil servants (holders of a .gouv.fr email address). Does that make you think of something? It’s normal. Designed, developed and operated by the Ministry of Culture with the support of DINUM (Interministerial Department of Digital), France Transfer aims to be an alternative to other platforms that have so far been very popular by default with State agents, such as WeTransfer, Dropbox, Mega.nz, or SwissTransfer. The objective of France transfert is to ensure the sharing of voluminous files on computers, smartphones and digital tablets, between State agents, but also with partners or external service providers from the public sectors (from the territorial public or hospital), private, or associative.
The only essential condition for using this service: that the sender or the recipient of the message is a State agent. In practice, several options are offered to secure and personalize its sending as well as possible. In addition to encryption and double authentication (used here, remember, for sharing “non-sensitive” files), it is possible to import a list of contacts, decide on a retention period for files sent ( by default, the retention period is set at 30 days), to enter the email addresses of the various recipients or to request a share link to send and consult the files concerned.
France transfer: a secure and sovereign tool
In two months of existence, the France transfer service has already recorded 10,500 shipments and 15,000 downloads. To which must be added the fact that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently decided to make France Transfer a “default tool” for its 13,700 agents. The dynamic of adoption is therefore very real. The new service is now part of SNAP (the “public officer’s digital backpack”), a working environment which brings together a set of tools of French origin and open source (which therefore emphasize the interoperability of uses). France transfert is hosted, in France, by a sovereign and secure cloud solution operated by 3DS Outscale, a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes, benefiting from the qualification SecNumCloud issued by theANSSI (the National Information Systems Security Agency).
Against the backdrop of the debate on digital sovereignty, the deployment of the France Transfer platform reflects, on the part of the State, a desire, punctuated periodically by very media-friendly announcements, to gain autonomy in relation to technological solutions. foreign (most often American). In September 2021, DINUM had thus enjoined public servants to no longer use the Microsoft 365 offer. However, if file sharing via France transfert only concerns so-called data “not sensitive”it should also be understood by this term that in the field of data analysis solutions linked to defense technology and the world of intelligence), many points of friction are not, despite the good intentions often displayed, still completely resolved.