It’s no wonder companies today are faced with so many different solutions, as people turning to home office has resulted in explosive growth of new innovations used in modern organizations worldwide. To combat the issue of too many choices, many companies have decided to consolidate all tools and applications into a single, productivity platform.

The single platform has become a one-stop-shop for all your work life: your files, contacts, collaboration efforts and more. This IT innovation saves on cost, improves security and productivity of employees.

In this blog, we will explain the factors influencing companies and governments to choose integrated productivity platforms like Nextcloud over an assortment of individual tools.

Costs

There is a financial cost associated with using multiple platforms for work productivity. Let’s take a look at what some popular platforms are charging businesses and how Nextcloud, a single, integrated platform, compares, from a reputable hosting partner, Deutsche Telekom:

As you can see, when businesses choose to use multiple different platforms, costs will add up significantly. Luckily, this is entirely avoidable with a single productivity platform that is an all-in-one. For a fraction of the cost, you can have all the tools you need for your employees. That goes without noting Nextcloud is entirely open source, avoiding vendor lock-in and protecting your customers’s data privacy.

But there is more to the cost. In most organizations, purchasing a SaaS service or another is a very easy and informal process. And with all those vendors you end up with, getting an overview of what you spend IT budget on is nearly impossible. It is no wonder that studies show over 1/3rd of SaaS spending is wasted. Much of that is due to subscriptions on apps that are no longer used, for employees who left the company, and so on. But here’s the trick: having less vendors means it is easier to get control over your spending!

Now let’s talk about the next benefit, productivity.

Productivity

Switching between different user interfaces all day may seem like second nature, but it adds up in more ways than one. As stated in the Harvard Business Review study, research in psychology and neuroscience have shown that jumping between tasks — also called “context switching” — is cognitively taxing. It slows you down, derails your focus causing more opportunities for errors and ultimately decreases your daily work productivity.

Take this example: You’ve finally finished a project with an important customer and you’re ready to show the final report to your manager. However, you can’t remember where your final report is located. Did you upload it onto Dropbox? Or was it in that long email chain? Or rather, did your colleague put it on his daughter’s USB stick while he was working from home? As you can see, a file can get lost quite easily if you don’t have one dedicated place for it, not to mention the communication and workflow involving the file. In Nextcloud’s single platform, your file is stored where you left it – in one folder.

Not only is everything in one place making things easier, but tools are integrated. Back to our example, once you’re in a video call to show your manager your final report, you can simply share the file right into the conversation. With Nextcloud Talk, you can share any file, document or spreadsheet in a chat or video call. Forgetting your final report’s location is a problem simply in the past.

More examples of Nextcloud’s interoperability are:

• Sharing a document within the document itself in the media tab where you can even configure restricted access if necessary
• Sharing a document directly in a Talk video call or chat
• Sharing a document in an appointment in Calendar so it’s readily available for all parties
• Sharing a document in a Deck card to better collaborate

Your collaboration possibilities are truly endless when you never have to leave the platform.

Security

In just the first half of 2022, there have been 236.1 million ransomware attacks worldwide. Given this incredible rise of ransomware attacks, it’s vital for your organization or company to take protective action. Using 5 different applications means 5x the risk of a breach, and often, due to password re-use or single-sign-on, a breach in one spreads to the others. So, using a single collaboration platform decreases the security risks of an organisation or company.

As a Nextcloud Enterprise user, you have access to early security and stability patches and if you host on-premises or in a local data center, it’s all under your control too. No need to wait for a third party to inform you of the breach or hope they act competently.

Ease of maintenance

Each platform you run or use has to be managed and maintained. And especially when you host them yourself, you need to have and maintain the inhouse expertise to run the system. Certainly, running a Java, PHP, Go and Node.JS each require different skills to maintain, security reports to keep up to date with and so on. Besides the different down time schedules this would result in, scaling is another concern: each of these technologies scales in a different way, horizontally or vertically, and has different bottlenecks (CPU, memory, bandwidth and so on).

Certainly, having such a heterogenous environment might be fun for sysadmin. But it won’t be for the rest of the organisation, at least in terms of cost, security and long term stability. And when a problem shows up and the different products and their support teams all point fingers to each other rather than taking responsibility and fixing the problem, even the system administrator will lose interest…

While Nextcloud uses various technologies where it makes sense, including Rust, Go, PHP and C++, it is a well understood and designed whole, scaling consistently. We take responsibility for the entire product, saving cost and improving reliability.

A trend just begun

Integrated, single platforms like Nextcloud are just at the beginning of a trend that’s really just begun. Larger companies like Microsoft and Google have already been working towards single platforms for years because they see the benefits for their customers and cost advantages. Even one-product companies like Zoom are now looking towards expanding into an entire «Zoomtopia» complete with mail and calendar.

But are those separate solutions not better?

Often you’ll hear: pick the best tool for the job. And yes, will Calendly have, somewhere tucked in a corner, a feature you won’t find in an integrated solution from Microsoft, Google or Nextcloud? Perhaps.

Certainly, not all software is the same, and for a feature you lose left, you gain another on the right. But the benefit of an improved user experience often outweighs the occasional feature difference, certainly for less technical users. Is it worth the additional security risk, additional administrative overhead, maintenance work and cost?

If you rely on multiple platforms for their product just because they are «the expert» on their product, you might want to think again. By using a single platform, you save in cost, increase productivity, can rely on high security and maintenance.

What our users have to say

Our users have experienced first-hand what a single platform can do for their business. Read on to see what some of them say about how Nextcloud meets and exceeds their productivity, security and maintenance goals.

“Collabora, Nextcloud Talk, News, Announcement Center is what bounds me within the software. I don’t have to use different applications to communicate with my colleagues, don’t need different applications to sync my files, don’t need different applications to read my atom feeds, etc. You know where I’m going. Nextcloud is the complete set of application. It has indeed replaced Dropbox, Google Drive, Zoom, Google RSS Reader, and tons of other software from my life.”

Diggaj U., reviewer on Capterra

One of the reasons Sam T. chose Nextcloud for his business was because of the large app ecosystem.

“Its easy to use, stable and dependable, extremely customisable, and works across all mobile and desktop operating systems. Perhaps most importantly, through the built in app store, it serves as a platform for many other key business applications which we need, such as collaborative document editing, calendar and contact sync and share, internal knowledge base (wiki), and more.”

Sam T., reviewer on Capterra

“It’s a brilliant way of sharing files across multiple devices and sharing files with others. I was looking for my own version of Dropbox and Nextcloud fits the bill, and some. Some of the more recent Apps really could make this a complete solution, with the Collarora/Onlyoffice integration, Decks, Circles, Passwords, Email, Talk, etc. And it’s open source.”

Adrian W., reviewer on Capterra

How do you use Nextcloud to better collaborate? What does it mean for you to work on a single platform?

We’d love to hear from you – write a comment below or review us today on one of the many rating platforms that support our product and service.

We hope you enjoyed this article about why using a single platform is more productive and efficient by ten-fold!

Nextcloud Reviews

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Como siempre, las versiones menores incluyen mejoras de estabilidad y seguridad diseñadas para que la actualización sea segura y rápida.

Puedes encontrar la lista completa de cambios, correcciones y mejoras de estas versiones en nuestro sitio web.

También hemos lanzado una nueva versión de nuestro cliente de escritorio, la 3.6.4. Además de una serie de correcciones de errores, esta versión mejora la compatibilidad con la función «editar localmente» de Hub 3, que te permite abrir un archivo desde el navegador a tu escritorio. El archivo se bloqueará mientras lo editas en tu escritorio, ¡y se desbloqueará después de guardar y cerrar el editor!

Nota: No habrá más versiones de Nextcloud Hub 2 (23.0.x). Actualiza a Nextcloud Enterprise para seguir recibiendo actualizaciones de seguridad y estabilidad o pásate a Nextcloud Hub 2 (24.0.x) o Nextcloud Hub 3 (25.0.x). No olvides que ejecutar software orientado a la web sin actualizaciones periódicas es arriesgado. Por favor, mantente al día con las versiones de Nextcloud tanto del servidor como de sus aplicaciones, ¡por la seguridad de tus datos! Los clientes siempre pueden contar con nuestro soporte de actualización si lo necesitan.

Nota²: PHP 7.4 ya no está soportado oficialmente por la comunidad PHP. Nextcloud ha soportado PHP 8.0 y versiones más recientes desde hace algún tiempo, y te recomendamos encarecidamente que te pases a una versión más reciente de PHP. La versión 8.0 ya está fuera de soporte activo (!) y sólo le quedan 11 meses de actualizaciones de seguridad. Nextcloud Hub 3 (25.0.x) sigue siendo compatible con PHP 7.4, pero te recomendamos que utilices PHP 8.1 y nuestra próxima versión de Hub 4 dejará de ser compatible con 7.4 y una versión posterior la eliminará. publicado hoy.

¿Preparado para pasar a Nextcloud Hub 3?

Nextcloud Hub 3 se lanzó el pasado mes de octubre y te recomendamos encarecidamente que lo actualices para beneficiarte de las últimas funciones. Consulta el anuncio del lanzamiento aquí.

Fin del soporte público para Nextcloud Hub 2 (serie 23.0.x)

Nextcloud Hub 2 (23.0.x) ya no se mantiene. Seguiremos publicando actualizaciones de seguridad y corrección de errores sólo para Nextcloud Enterprise 23 y versiones anteriores. Si eres un usuario doméstico, pásate al Hub 2 (24.0.x) o al Hub 3 (25.0.x) lo antes posible. Si utilizas Nextcloud en un entorno comercial, echa un vistazo a nuestro Nextcloud Enterprise, ya que probablemente sea más adecuado para ti. Como siempre, te recomendamos encarecidamente que te actualices para asegurarte de que dispones de una plataforma de colaboración de contenidos segura y fiable que respeta tu soberanía digital.

Por supuesto, esto también es cierto para las aplicaciones: mantenerlas actualizadas tiene ventajas de seguridad, además de las nuevas funciones y otras correcciones de errores.

Mantente seguro: ¡mantén tu servidor actualizado!

Las versiones menores de Nextcloud son correcciones de errores de seguridad y funcionalidad, ¡no reescrituras de sistemas importantes que pongan en riesgo los datos de los usuarios! También realizamos pruebas exhaustivas, tanto en nuestra base de código como actualizando una serie de sistemas del mundo real a las versiones de prueba. Esto garantiza que las actualizaciones a versiones menores sean, por lo general, indoloras y fiables. Como las actualizaciones no sólo solucionan problemas de funciones, sino también de seguridad, ¡es una mala idea no actualizar!

Si mantienes un sistema Nextcloud de misión crítica para tu empresa, es muy recomendable que te hagas con un seguro (y con seguridad laboral… ¿a quién culparán si el sistema de gestión de archivos no funciona como se espera?) Una línea directa con el núcleo de desarrolladores de Nextcloud es la mejor garantía de un servicio fiable para tus usuarios, y de la seguridad de tu trabajo como administrador del sistema.

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As always, minor releases include stability and security improvements that are designed to be a safe and quick upgrade.

You can find the full changelog of fixes and improvements for these releases on our website.

Note: There will be no more releases of Nextcloud Hub 1 (22.0.x). Upgrade to Nextcloud Enterprise to continue to get security and stability updates or move to Nextcloud Hub 2 (23.0.x or 24.0.x) or Nextcloud Hub 3 (25). Don’t forget that running web-facing software without regular updates is risky. Please stay up to date with Nextcloud releases of both the server and its apps, for the safety of your data! Customers can always count on our upgrade support if needed.

Ready to move to Nextcloud Hub 3?

Nextcloud Hub 3 was released last month and we highly recommend that you upgrade to benefit from the latest features. Check out the release announcement here.

End of public support for Nextcloud Hub 1 (22 series)

Nextcloud Hub 1 (22.0.x) is no longer maintained. We will continue to release security and bug fix updates only for Nextcloud Enterprise 22. If you are a home user, move to Hub 2 (23.0.x or 24.0.x) or Hub 3 (25.0.x) as soon as possible. If you use Nextcloud in a commercial setting, check out our Nextcloud Enterprise as that is likely more suited for you. As always we strongly recommend you update to ensure you have a secure and reliable content collaboration platform that respects your digital sovereignty!

This is, of course, also true for apps: Keeping them updated has security benefits, besides the new features and other bug fixes.

Stay safe: keep your server up-to-date!

Minor Nextcloud releases are security and functionality bug fixes, not rewrites of major systems that risk user data! We also do extensive testing, both in our code base and by upgrading a series of real-world systems to the test versions. This ensures that upgrades to minor releases are generally painless and reliable. As the updates not only fix feature issues but also security problems, it is a bad idea to not upgrade!

If you are maintaining a mission-critical Nextcloud system for your enterprise, it is highly recommended that you get yourself some insurance (and job security… who gets blamed if the file handling system isn’t working as expected?). A hotline to the core Nextcloud developers is the best guarantee for reliable service for your users, and the job safety of you as a system administrator.

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When it comes to protecting your data, we want to be your #1 trusted technology and provide you with state-of-the-art, industry leading tools that go beyond today’s technology standards.

Nextcloud offers more security features and benefits than most people realize, and today we want to zoom in on 5 of them.

Remote Wipe

Remote wipe is a Data Leak Prevention (DLP) method that allows a system administrator to remotely delete data from a device. It’s especially useful if your device is lost, has been stolen or when an employee no longer works for your organization.

Due to built-in Nextcloud support, Remote wipe will not only work on systems under the management of a company (MDM), but also on the private devices of employees in BYOD situations or for friends who have an account on your server. Therefore it is also helpful for home users, large universities, and non-profits who often don’t fully control the devices of their users.

2 examples when Remote wipe is essential:

• In a scenario where guest accounts were handed to a third party who use private devices, say for planning an event: when the event is over, you can wipe the documents from the devices of guests you gave access.
• In a situation where an employee leaves the company and keeps their device(s): If you want to make sure an ex-employee can’t access company data, you can utilize Remote wipe and to remove the company data from their devices.

Stolen or lost devices usually catch you unprepared. Therefore, this feature is supported by all official Nextcloud clients, for Android, iOS and desktops. Note that the Nextcloud Remote Wipe feature can only remove data from online devices.

Curious? Watch the video to see how it works:

Video Verification

In situations where extreme security is warranted and the identity of a recipient must be verified with absolute certainty before they are granted access, Nextcloud includes the industry-first implementation of Video Verification in a file sync and share solution.

You might be familiar with this process from the opening of online bank accounts: you have to record yourself or have to have a live session with a human. In both cases, a human has to check your identity before you gain access.

Similarly, Video Verification enforces a Nextcloud Talk video call before access is given to a share, making sure the identity of the recipient is properly checked. The call can be picked up through the Nextcloud Talk Mobile apps as well as the web interface.

At Nextcloud, we want you to feel 100% certain that your data is protected and under your control and jurisdiction.

Private Cloud Security Scan

To help our system administrators assess the security of their private cloud server, we have developed the Private Cloud Security Scan.

Our scan is strictly based on publicly available information, that is, the list of known vulnerabilities relevant for Nextcloud releases as well as any applied hardenings or settings we can scan without having access to the server.

It’s available for free here, just add your server URL.

Security Bug Bounties

Nextcloud protects your security with up to $10,000 in our HackerOne’s Bug Bounty program.

We have partnered with HackerOne because of its extraordinary popularity among IT security professionals. The widely used platform has a global hacking community that uncovers high-risk vulnerabilities fast and which allows us to quickly leverage the collective knowledge of a huge amount of security experts. Over 3,000 hackers have already reported countless bugs for Nextcloud and reaped the benefits.

“Nextcloud’s commitment to responsiveness and putting security first puts them in the best position to attract top hacker talent to continue to supplement the good work their internal security team is doing to protect customers.” – Michiel Prins, Co-founder HackerOne.

Anyone reporting a security vulnerability in Nextcloud can earn up to $10,000, making ours one of the highest security bug bounty programs in the open-source industry!

Learn more in our latest update about the program and read the HackerOne Case Study!

Virtual Data Room

In settings where a strong security firewall is needed between departments or organizations without impeding smooth and efficient collaboration within each team, a separate Virtual Data Room can be set up. Nextcloud offers a range of features for VDR use and its on-premises nature offers unparalleled confidentiality and control.

For Nextcloud, VDR is a set of features to implement the concept of a VDR, with flexibility in the exact implementation. In our next post, you will learn about some of these features!

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With this webinar session you will get an insight on how Nextcloud is covering all the important measures that are needed for storing sensitive information in an organisation.

Nextcloud for storing sensitive data!

Sign up for a free webinar on Wednesday, 29th June 2022 to find out how Nextcloud can be deployed for storing sensitive data

• Date: Wednesday, 29th June 2022
• Time: 3:00 PM (CEST) / 9:00 AM (EDT) / 6:00 AM (PDT)

Save my slot!

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