At ZGT, a hospital in the Netherlands, the IT team turned to Nextcloud to keep their data secure, on-premises, and compliant.

As Jeroen Agten, Coordinator ICT at ZGT puts it, “health care data is very valuable, it is like digital gold.”

About ZGT Hospital

ZGT is a hospital in Almelo and Hengelo in the Netherlands known for their expertise in oncology, complex diabetes, and obesitas. They also have a small clinic in the Dutch region of Twente.

Between handling half a million policlinial visits every year, 25,000 clinical admissions, and 52,000 daily treatments, they obtain an enormous amount of data.

They also work with several other academic hospitals in the area which they collaborate with to deliver the best possible results for their patients.

Digital Sovereignty First

When ZGT began to realize the possibilities and benefits of achieving digital sovereignty, they decided to deploy Nextcloud to help them carry it out.

One benefit of digital sovereignty is having complete vendor independence. During the corona crisis, a lot of hospitals accepted the “free” Microsoft Teams offer which typically resulted in employees also using the rest of Microsoft products and ultimately getting locked-in without a proper decision making process or risk-benefit analysis ever having been made. Such vendor lock-in not only limits flexibility, but also results in significant costs, especially with the big tech companies. With Nextcloud, ZGT’s files are under their own control and the solution is much more cost effective.

Another benefit is how easy it is to achieve compliance with privacy regulations. With services like Microsoft that store some or all of the data in data centers overseas, implementing their service involves a long and complicated journey to comply with both EU and Dutch compliance regulations. With Nextcloud, there were no compliance loopholes and they get through audits easily because all their data is on-premises in their own data centers.

To learn about more ways ZGT accomplished digital soverienty with Nextcloud, read the full case study.

Implementing Nextcloud with Ease

ZGT started the Nextcloud implementation with their IT department, and then rolled it out to more teams and departments. After each implementation, they discovered the whole process flowed with ease.

The repo team for instance took advantage of Nextcloud’s storage capabilities right away by uploading all their documents since 1993 – 100 GB of data – in one night. This was entirely unplanned, but the IT team was pleased to see that Nextcloud held up perfectly fine.

On the engineering team, users caught on to the interface quickly and soon wanted more – in the form of apps. Implementing new apps like dicom viewer for example added new functionality and were incredibly useful for the team.

As more and more teams implemented and were trained to use Nextcloud, the more positive responses they got. Nextcloud was easy to collaborate on, store large amounts of data, and endless apps could be added.

To read more about ZGT’s easy Nextcloud implementation, read the full case study.

Overall, in the case of Dutch hospital ZGT, Nextcloud speaks for itself. They were able to create a scalable Nextcloud infrastructure that serves all the needs of their users, is on-premise, cost effective, and secure.

Nextcloud Enterprise is certified to serve healthcare administrations like ZGT’s needs, including our HIPAA and HITECH compliance. We are committed to ensure our software keeps PHI (Protected Health Information) private and secure. Read more about how Nextcloud fits in a HIPAA compliant infrastructure on our Nextcloud in Healthcare page.

To discover the full ZGT hospital story, read the full case study and get a plethora of insider details, quotes from their team and leadership, and reasons why Nextcloud is ideal for use in hospitals.

The post Dutch hospital ZGT achieves digital sovereignty with Nextcloud appeared first on Nextcloud.

The Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning, Boverket, will be using a private packaged cloud service consisting of Nextcloud Hub for its 270 employees. Boverket wanted to procure a modern and functional platform that at the same time meets regulatory requirements. The housing agency has procured this digital collaboration cloud service based on findings and functional mappings presented within the digital collaboration report from the Swedish government.

This cloud service will be delivered and operated by our local partner Redpill Linpro and offers capabilities for video meetings, chat, file sharing and document management to the authority’s 270 employees.

This news follows a clear trend where Swedish and Nordic authorities, municipalities and companies are in need of solutions and services which are able to comply with their regulatory requirements.

More information

• Website of Boverket, Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning.
• Press release about Boverket on website Redpill Linpro.
• eSam Report « Digital collaboration platform for the public sector » from the Swedish government.

The post Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning chooses Nextcloud appeared first on Nextcloud.

SUNET, a Swedish company, found a solution to providing a GDPR compliant service through their provider Safespring.

Today, we can introduce to you Sunet Drive: A managed storage solution installed in an institutions local IT environment built on trusted open-source software and open standards.

The Swedish solution

SUNET is the Swedish University Computer Network which provides high-speed Internet access to academic institutions in Sweden. Part of SUNET is the NREN or Swedish National Research & Education organization which was founded in the 1980’s as a research project for Swedish computer scientists. Together, they now connect 750,000 users including researchers, teachers and students in 110 organizations via 8,400 km of fiber.

Safespring is the provider of SUNET’s cloud offering to the Swedish academic sector and has since built large scale cloud solutions for SUNET’s customers.

With Sunet Drive by Safespring, users don’t need to worry about the security issues behind public cloud services or have to rely on their own institutions to implement, run, and maintain a private cloud. The result is a reliable storage system that’s GDPR compliant.

Nextcloud in Sunet Drive

Nextcloud is an integral part of the Sunet Drive solution.

When users want to share documents, files and other project components to colleagues internally as well as external users, it is easily done. Users have complete control and autonomy over sharing permissions to enable who gets access, when and where.

From a technical perspective, there are several self-containing nodes which are installations of Nextcloud. Within each Nextcloud node are S3 bucket’s which are basically separate external drives that have the ability to store an entire project. From an operations perspective, Nextcloud servers can easily be scaled out by adding more instances that may be needed.

Also, with Nextcloud there is the possibility for a single sign-on capability for users. This is due to the Global Site Selector functionality which is another Nextcloud node.

With the help of other open source software Ceph and OpenStack, the virtual machines behind the use of Nextcloud is able to run smoothly.

How it works (an end user perspective)

It is relatively simple to use this enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) solution.

First, a user logs in through their institutional account using a single sign-on made possible by the Global Site Selector. Then, the user is re-directed to their federated node co-managed between Sunet/Safespring and/or their institution. This basically means that a user can have a dedicated storage area for a specific project (the S3 bucket) which then shows up as a normal folder in Nextcloud and is thus subject to Nextcloud standard applications and processes.

From there, collaboration with researchers at other institutions is easily possible by inviting them into Sunet Drive. This is possible due to the look-up server residing in other Nextcloud nodes which is able to seamlessly find them. Once you’ve established your connection, you can easily make file transfers between institutions due to the NREN network.

Lastly, once a project is completed, the properties of the S3 bucket can not only be changed, but the ownership of the data can be transferred too. That being said, if a user moves to another institution at any time, they can access their new Nextcloud node without any hassle or complexities.

We hope this provides a concrete perspective for your understanding and have equally shown the wonderful benefits of this collaboration!

Perfect for an education environment

In the education industry, collaboration is key to innovation and progress. We gain new ideas and perspectives from others and need to work with them to make progress.

The Sunet Drive SafeSpring solution with Nextcloud is made to fit researcher, educator and student needs at universities and delivers all the requirements of a storage solution. From collaboration and ease of use, to low cost and compliancy standards, universities all over Europe are covered.

We are proud to be the trusted open-source software for Sunet Drive that allows the data to follow the researcher, and not the other way around.

To learn more about the implementation of Nextcloud in Sunet Drive, read the full case study here.

The post GDPR compliant collaboration coming to 750K students, teachers and researchers in Sweden appeared first on Nextcloud.

Cloud centered, cloud focused

For some time now, Stadtsparkasse München has been running an on-premises Nextcloud server to exchange confidential data with customers. More recently, in 2020, the bank decided that they wanted to transfer all their internal managed systems to the data centers of competent, regional partners. With a Gold Partnership with Nextcloud, HKN stood out as an ideal partner for running their Nextcloud services.

Nextcloud offers a unique on-premises solution for financial services companies.

HKN delivers Nextcloud on its open cloud

With 25 years of experience in hosting Linux applications, HKN was more than capable to deliver quality results with all Stadtsparkasse’s requirements for a provider. From being a German based data center, to having significant migration experience, their top five requirements were met.

For several months, HKN was there throughout the entire process, ensuring a smooth migration and testing every detail. The end result satisfied employees and administrators.

By switching to HKN’s Open Cloud, Stadtsparkasse München achieved high availability, scalability, DSGVO-compliant hosting, and more.

Nextcloud Enterprise & beyond

Through HKN, Stadtsparkasse München benefits from Nextcloud Enterprise advantages like improved security, stability and of course direct access to our top engineers.

As a highly trusted financial institution, Stadtsparkasse München has always been looking a step ahead to provide the most advanced, modern, and secure solutions that deliver the best service to their valued customers in Munich and beyond. They are a bank committed to their city and with this interest in society they keep an integral focus on new apps and features.

Check out the case study to get a detailed look at how Stadtsparkasse München, HKN, and Nextcloud conquered the challenge, how they implemented it, and the final results.

The post Stadtsparkasse Munich facilitates customer data exchange with Nextcloud by HKN appeared first on Nextcloud.

The administration in charge consists of approximately 4,500 employees located at different locations scattered across the city. They are comprised of a Secretariat General and five departments which involve several services. A major part of their daily workflow is collaborating with all the teams across the city and for a long time, were faced with a major challenge. This mainly concerned an outdated filing system with fewer functionalities, flexibility, and security.

From ownCloud to Nextcloud due to security concerns

When you want to exchange files seamlessly, collaborate internally and externally, and all the while having a system that is easy to use for all, working on a cloud is a great place to start. In 2013, the City of Geneva took its first steps toward this change and implemented ownCloud. However, after four years and a progressive decline in meeting expectations, they chose to look to Nextcloud.

With such prominence and importance on a global level, the Geneva city administrators place a high priority on security. It is very important for them to have a cloud solution that is secure, compliant with privacy law, and that all their data is kept in Switzerland. With Nextcloud, these requirements were all possible and to prove it, extensive measures were evaluated to make sure our solution was the best fit.

After testing the solution in a Proof of Concept, it clearly appeared that Nextcloud was
professionally developed and maintained. It was also very stable and the security audit was excellent. We also got strong support during the proof of concept, even without a subscription and not being a customer yet. It was prompt, professional and very efficient.

From a lengthy code audit involving a third party to a proof of concept proven incredibly successful, they finally were convinced to turn to Nextcloud for good and haven’t looked back since.

An Effective Switch to Nextcloud

Nextcloud could finally provide what the City of Geneva needed, and more. For instance, now when an employee needs to share a file to a recipient outside of the organization, all it takes is copying a link of the file and sending it in an email.

It is as easy as accessing a webpage. The best [part] about it is that people who receive the link do not have to install Nextcloud or anything, they just click the link!

Nextcloud also notably delivered on many factors relating to their unique needs, including:

• Sharing capabilities, done in just two clicks securely and easily.

• Ability to manage users in a few seconds, as opposed to 8 minutes under ownCloud.

• Servers on ESX farm for virtual machines, as well as in brick and mortar buildings for physical servers.

• Infinite space for their 1,025,000 files, 1.2 Tb of data, and 2,200 active users who collaborate internally and externally.

• And more!

The future of Nextcloud in the City of Geneva

From Nextcloud Files to Calendar, the City of Geneva employees find our platform and service useful, intuitive, and plain and simple easy to use. Why stop there? They are currently underway to implement even more Nextcloud capabilities like Deck and Talk.

The City of Geneva is using their Nextcloud Enterprise subscription to its maximum advantage. From being able to ask for new features anytime, to have quick resolutions for ad-hoc issues, Enterprise allows the client to focus on what they need and want, while having direct and 24/7 access to Nextcloud engineers who know the platform like the back of their hand.

Interested in reading the full case study? Download the case study here and read more about the expectations, challenges, migration, and results from the City of Geneva.

The post City of Geneva: Deploying Nextcloud to achieve Digital sovereignty appeared first on Nextcloud.

SIB is a major, global public actor of digital services that supports healthcare structures and public entities in their digital transformation. They have been working on taking the information systems to the next level for the Ille-et-Vilaine department in France, including middle schools.

SIB provides infrastructures to teachers and pupils: computers, servers, hosted applications, networks and support. They wanted to modernize their former file system with new requirements :

• Remote access
• Multidevices compatibility (smartphones, tablets, computers…)
• Advanced collaboration features on documents
• Advanced sharing features
• Share groups

We built a test version simulating the use of Nextcloud in the middle school environment. We had excellent feedback and we validated the solution.

Using Nextcloud and Collabora Online

The initial deployment is serving 5 middle schools, which is approximately 12000 users. This number will be risen to 33.000 pupils and 2.500 teachers in 57 middle schools step by step.

Students work from home, inside Nextcloud Group Folders and use Collabora Online. This way teachers don’t have the issue that they don’t have the right Microsoft Office version to read the students’ work, avoiding interoperability problems.

Teachers and directors of schools use Collabora also for sharing and collaboration for administrative tasks.

Great user feedback

Users welcomed Nextcloud and its features with great enthusiasm: they loved the remote access to documents, online collaborative edition and the user-friendliness of the solution.

Some teachers already used online hosting solutions. For them, having the same experience hosted in Britanny by a security, privacy and protection-oriented public organization was a very positive experience. For users unfamiliar with those services, offered support and personal coaching was offered during migration phases. They gained experience with Nextcloud and used it for innovative uses with their pupils during class time.

There’s more!

Read the full case study to learn more about the reasons that made SIB choose Nextcloud & Collabora for this project, their initial requirements, technical configurations and infrastructure decisions.

Find more whitepapers and case studies for a deep insight in what Nextcloud has to offer in your industry.

The post Use Case: SIB delivering Nextcloud to 2500 teachers and 33000 pupils in Brittany, France appeared first on Nextcloud.

The post Swedish Government FR appeared first on Nextcloud.

The Centre de gestion informatique de l’éducation, the IT resource management administration of the Ministry of National Education, Children and Youth in Luxembourg, is in charge of preparing and implementing the government’s policy in the areas of education, children and youth. In 2020, the CGIE launched a Nextcloud service to provide about 15000 teachers and staff members with a GDPR-compliant file storage.

Corona and GDPR

Even before the Corona pandemic, Luxembourg had given all pupils and teachers access to the Microsoft 365 cloud, but on the condition that it not be used for documents relevant to data protection. For these documents, an on-premise hosted cloud was to be set up, which would enable the GDPR-compliant hosting of data.

With the onset of the Corona pandemic, the pressure to build such a cloud quickly increased. The IT organization quickly decided on Nextcloud as the cloud software, and for the data storage they wanted to use the service of a Luxembourg provider for S3-compatible storage if possible. In addition, it was clear from the beginning that they needed Nextcloud Enterprise and a partner to set up and operate the Nextcloud service to ensure reliability and compliance. HKN GmbH convinced with its long experience in operating large Nextcloud installations.

Great results

Today, Luxembourg provides its teachers with a fast, GDPR-compliant and productive cloud collaboration platform. The system has incredibly good performance, something that was an important focus as it was key for acceptance of the solution. The cluster setup with caching, database cluster and up-to-date hardware can serve thousands of users without any waiting times.

Find the full whitepaper on our website.

If your organization is looking for a reliable, fast and compliant Nextcloud instance, contact our partner HKN, which runs three independent, ISO 27001 data centers on 100% green power in Germany. Quick deployment, quality service and fast performance are guaranteed!

The post 15K teachers in Luxembourg start using Nextcloud appeared first on Nextcloud.

To date, organizations in Europe have largely relied on proprietary, foreign collaboration platforms due to a lack of viable alternatives. This leads to dependency and a quasi-monopoly position for mostly US and China-based software and service providers while also introducing data protection and privacy concerns. Nextcloud supports businesses, governments and individuals in data protection-compliant digitalization, providing a complete, modern solution for communication and collaboration. Nextcloud has been proven in tens of thousands of organizations with tens of millions of users across the globe and is widely adopted by businesses and government organizations across Europe.

The German eID Card (“Personalausweis”), which has been certified at the highest possible level of assurance with the eIDAS-Regulation, can be used by all citizens for electronic identification (eID) and for strong pseudonymous authentication on the Internet. Until now, this has been used in a range of special applications mostly in the German government sector.

With the “eID-Login” App for Nextcloud developed by ecsec GmbH on behalf of the Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, BSI), it is now possible to use the German eID Card in Nextcloud for strong authentication. The technology is published under an Open Source license and available at no cost. This makes Nextcloud an even more viable platform for use in e-government or data protection critical use cases.

It is great to see the German governments’ interest in supporting Nextcloud as the first popular collaboration and cloud solution with support for the German eID Card for strong authentication and identification. This enhances its strength s a platform already used by tens of millions of users in government, education, finance and health care for real-time collaboration in a secure, compliant and privacy-respecting manner.

— Frank Karlitschek, CEO and Founder of Nextcloud

The early and consequent consideration of relevant security aspects according to the „Security by Design“ principle and the publication of the « eID-Login » App for Nextcloud as Open Source ensure that a very high level of trustworthiness is achieved. Thanks to the SkIDentity service, which is provided without fee for the project, the (German) eID card can now be used free of charge for strong authentication in Nextcloud.

Read the full press release here (German).

The post German government supports authentication with identity card in Nextcloud appeared first on Nextcloud.