The German Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund) has chosen Nextcloud as its collaboration and file-sharing platform. As a result, 300,000 government users will now be using open source.
ITZBund uses Nextcloud Enterprise Subscription to gain access to 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, co-founder 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 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, including 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 subject of the procurement process was the construction of a private cloud for the federal government,” shared 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 center that you trust, and anyone can inspect the code, check for security vulnerabilities, anytime, anywhere and change if necessary”. Read more…
