Articles like that are really nice to read. Thank you for sharing.
It would be nice to have a way to backup data in other geographical locations somehow. Usually the backups don’t take force majeure into account, just smaller incidents.
“How bad can it get, really?”
Well, entire cities can vanish in hours because of wildfires, storms, flooding or war. Again, it’s a matter of efficiency versus resilience. The replacement systems need to be quick and uncomplicated to set up and the mirrors for the software accessible at all times.
you may check if the NAPS2 scanner program could handle your scanner. runs both on windows and linux, and has good documentation. on windows it can make use of TWAIN and WIA drivers: Windows Scanning - NAPS2
if it can, you may set up its “scanner sharing” feature. then you can connect to it from the NAPS2 runing on the host linux system.
I have been using NAPS2 for years, starting on windows, and I had no problems scanning on linux with a scanner shared from a windows PC.
it also has OCR, plenty of settings and even support for scanners with an auto feeder.
with this strategy you wont be able to ditch the windows vm, but scaning could become easier for the end users.
The LiMux project by the city of Munich was based on Ubuntu:
But I personally would recommend SuSE Enterprise Linux (SEL) because of their professional support and because it is based in Germany (once again after being part of Novell for a while).
That would be SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE). 
@mpeter Thanks for the information on NAPS2. After going through the site, the program looks promising. I noted though, OpenSuse is not listed as one of the operating systems that supports NAPS2. I searched through YAST to see if it was in one of the usual repositories - no it was not. Do you know if NAPS2 works within OpenSuse Tumbleweed??