Île-de-France offers 550,000 students and staff a sovereign cloud collaboration platform

A trusted digital environment for education and public service

In an ambitious digital transformation project, Île-de-France, the region around Paris, chose Nextcloud partner Leviia to implement Nextcloud as sovereign collaborative suite within the regional platform monlycée.net. The sovereign collaboration platform was designed to replace solutions from Microsoft.

This initiative connects over 550,000 students, teachers, and administrative staff across hundreds of high schools. In essence, they benefit from a secure, privacy-respecting environment for learning, collaboration and file exchange.

The project also puts into the spotlight the region’s, commitment to digital sovereignty, GDPR compliance, and independence from non-European cloud providers.

The need for a unified, compliant collaboration space

Île-de-France, the north-central French region with eight administrative areas (including Paris), relied heavily on their education platform, monlycée.net, as it played a central role in everyday school operations. Yet, file sharing, communication, and document collaborations needs had grown and so had the complexity of managing fragmented tools. It had also become increasingly difficult to maintain data protection, a very serious issues given that much of it was minor’s personal data.

To meet these challenge, the region, supported by its regional digital operator Worldline PSN, sought a cloud collaboration platform that would:

• Scale seamlessly to more than half a million users
• Integrate natively with the regional SSO and existing digital services
• Deliver complete control over data location and security
• Ensure legislative compliance
• Reflect European values of privacy, transparency, and accessibility

Building a sovereign platform with Leviia and Nextcloud

After a thorough evaluation, Île-de-France selected Leviia, a French cloud provider and Nextcloud partner, for its technical expertise and long-standing commitment to open-source, privacy-first collaboration.

Leviia designed a Nextcloud instance capable to support over 500 thousand users through a single access point, with high availability and data distribution across three French data centers and integration with a number of key technologies needed by the regional government.

Key implementation features:

• Native integration with the Region’s SSO, Worldline PSN ecosystem, and existing monitoring systems (SOC/SIEM)
• Personalized storage of 10 to 100 GB per user, depending on their profile
• Collabora Online for document co-editing and group projects
• Advanced security measures including WAF, antivirus, anti-DDoS and erasure coding
• Full account life cycle automation aligned with the educational calendar

A public sector success story in digital sovereignty

The resulting Nextcloud-based platform combines ease of use, strong compliance and future scalability. Throughout documents, lesson materials, and administrative workflows, teachers and students alike immediately adopted the new system and welcomed the ability to collaborate securely.

Key outcomes:

• 550,000 active accounts
• Fast and stable performance
• Compliance ensured with GDPR, ISO 27001, and HDS standards
• Increased awareness of digital sovereignty in French educational sector

Shaping the future of sovereign digital education

The Île-de-France digital transformation project proves that open-source collaboration can scale securely at the national level, providing a secure European cloud ecosystem. The region has built a trusted digital workspace on Nextcloud backed by Leviia’s expertise and sovereign hosting.
The large-scale success is a model for other regions and government entities seeking to strengthen digital sovereignty and provide secure public services.