One of things that has happened over the past N years, for some value of N, is that a lot of universities have outsourced their email to one of the big providers of this (Microsoft and Google are the two most common). Email is far from the only thing that universities have outsourced; for example, most universities don't run their entire authentication stack, because push based MFA is typically only available through vendors . People online regularly decry this outsourcing, especially for email, and say that universities should bring all of these things back in house the way they used to be, especially in today's time of increasing geopolitical tensions. Another thing that people say is that universities shouldn't depend on clouds as much as they sometime do, especially the major clouds.

I don't disagree with these people, but at the same time I'm a realist about what's being asking for and what is involved. Universities did not wake up one day and decide to give large amounts of money to vendors for dubious reasons. Universities (such as mine ) carefully studied what it would cost to continue their existing in house systems (in both hardware and staffing) and what they would get from it, and compared that to what it would cost and what they would get from the big vendors. Then they decided that one of the big vendors was a better option, and this decision is not wrong. As I wrote a long time ago, the big providers are simply better at this than a university can be , and it's not just email, it's also things like web CMSes and identity providers .

If you're asking universities to move things back in house, what you're asking them to do is to spend more money and have a worse experience, with fewer features and more annoyances. There are arguments for doing this anyway, on on things like principle and risk mitigation, but you have to explicitly and honestly make this case. Potentially you have to make this case to people well beyond the universities themselves; if it's going to cost a significant amount of money to bring these things back in house, someone is going to have to pay for the staff and the computer hardware and so on.

(To put it bluntly, if the appropriate level of government isn't on board with this shift, it's almost certainly not a sustainable university policy even if the people in the university are on board with it.)

Since you're making this case in a university, it's not enough to convince the senior leaders. You really need to convince a large body of professors to at least go along with it, and ideally to actively advocate for it. If professors are not on board with this, if the overall culture of the university doesn't shift to considering it important to use in house things, what will happen is that people will quietly outsource things all over again, individually or in small groups. People will forward their email to personal addresses at big providers, professors will spend grant funds on clouds, administrative staff will quietly ignore the FOSS office software you'd like them to use and use the big name stuff that they're already familiar with and everyone else uses, people will conduct their discussions on the SaaS discussion forum you like least, and so on.

I'm convinced that such a shift to bring things back in house can be done (partly because some governments are doing it for government departments). But it's not going to be easy or fast. If you're serious about this, you have a lot of work and a long slog ahead of you to organize, advocate relentlessly, slowly bring people on to your side, and build consensus.