Keeping data secure at a globally distributed organization: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung


The Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) is the most influential political think-tank in Germany. The organization of over 1000 employees has 16 offices in Germany and a further 107 abroad. Working with politically sensitive data in countries where individual freedoms are often under attack requires the highest security and privacy standards, which led to the choice of Nextcloud as self-hosted, private collaboration platform.

Thanks to Nextcloud, working remotely and securely is not a problem anymore.

Choosing Nextcloud

In the past, users at the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung regularly uploaded files to public cloud services like Dropbox or Google Drive. This left the IT department with open questions with regards to data integrity and Data Protection Act (DPA) compliance. The social and politically sensitive work done by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung created a strong motivation to look for a file sharing solution that IT could control.

The Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung settled on Nextcloud, after trying other solutions, and the users are very satisfied with it. Daniel Kempkens, system administrator at KAS:

The main focus was to keep our users’ uploads in a controlled environment.


A Nextcloud Enterprise Subscription help the IT team keep the systems running smooth and secure. For the future, the team is looking towards Nextcloud Talk and already in the process of deploying ONLYOFFICE.

Download the free case study detailing the situation of Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and the solutions they chose from our white paper page.

The case study will also be presented during the Nextcloud Enterprise Day, August 27 2018.

“The main reasons to choose Nextcloud were its capabilities to authenticate users against our LDAP directory in combination with the open source strategy. We do not just have our hands on our data but also on the whole software itself, and can therefore decide which parts of the Nextcloud system we will enable or disable.