About 300,000 government users in Germany shift to Nextcloud for file sharing

The German Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund) has chosen Nextcloud as its collaboration and file sharing platform. As a result, approximately 300,000 government users will now be using open source.

ITZBund is using Nextcloud Enterprise Subscription to gain access to the operational, scaling and security expertise of Nextcloud GmbH as well as long term support of the software.

Nextcloud arrived on Germany’s tech scene in 2016 after Frank Karlitschek, cofounder of the open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud program OwnCloud, forked the software to create a more open source model. ITZBund, whose 2,700 IT admins run IT operations for about a million government workers, kicked off a pilot in 2016 covering about 5,000 end users with a variety of devices for which it needed to enable file-syncing support for Windows, Android and iOS products.

ITZBund has rolled out a collaboration and cloud storage tool called BC-Box, which employees can use to move data to the cloud and access it. Nextcloud was able to deliver the required Outlook add-on integration to allow users to send secure links rather than file attachments.

Nextcloud won a tender for a federal secure file exchange system in late 2017 to supply its services and support for three years. The company says it differs from public clouds offered by the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft by offering customers local data storage.

“The procurement process was for the construction of a private cloud for the federal government,” shared a company official from ITZBund.

Nextcloud’s Karlitschek said it offered better security than public cloud providers because “…you can run our software in its own data centre, which you trust, and anyone can inspect the code, and check for security vulnerabilities, anytime, anywhere, and then make changes, if necessary.”