Open source cloud gets a warm German welcome
Germany’s federal government is set to move to the opensource cloud service, partially due to privacy advantages.
Nextcloud ( https://nextcloud.com), the open source, self-hosted file share and communication platform, has scored a major win with the announcement that the German Federal Information Technology Centre (ITZBund), which oversees the IT services of the federal government, will be using its service.
This follows a pilot scheme that has been running since October 2016 with 5,000 users. According to Nextcloud, the government went with them because it was looking for an open source solution from a European company that could guarantee no vendor lock-in, and wouldn’t provide access to the data it held to third parties. ITZBund will use an on-premises cloud, and it’ll be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect on 25 May.
As some have pointed out, the fact that Nextcloud is not a US company is likely to have played an important role in choosing it over its US-based competitors. Not only does it help boost the European economy, but in 2014 the US courts ruled that a US-based company (Microsoft) had to comply with a search warrant to turn over data that was held in servers not in the States (you can read the report at
http://bit.ly/ms-judge-data). This obviously has serious privacy implications. In an interview ( https://bit.ly/2HjS8YI) with
Der Spiegel, ITZBund announced that the focus of this collaboration was “the construction of a private cloud for the federal government”.
Nextcloud’s code is certified by OpenChain and backed by a Security Bug Bounty Program that pays security experts for any vulnerabilities that they uncover, so it’s certainly a good move on ITZBund’s part, which operates IT services for more than a million users across the German federal government.