The Good Cloud offering secure Dutch Nextcloud hosting, 3 months free

As we’re all aware, due to the crisis many organizations and companies moved to online collaboration. Schools, companies, organizations and agencies have had to implement home working solutions quickly and have often had insufficient time to correctly estimate and limit the risks of these platforms. The privacy guarantee and compliance with the GDPR legislation have often been forgotten when moving to online working. Recently, many security and privacy breaches in popular, mostly US public cloud communications and collaboration platforms have come to light. In the Privacy Video Calling Guide of The Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP), the privacy risks of many of the apps is analyzed. According to the review, Signal, Jitsi and Nextcloud Talk were positive exceptions.

Our Dutch hosting partner The Good Cloud wanted to provide an alternative. Let me quote them:

We think this development is a very bad thing and we think it is important that, even in this current situation, people should be able to cooperate in an accessible, easy, but above all safe way, with privacy protection, without data leaks. The Good Cloud therefore offers its services, including the privacy-friendly Nextcloud Talk, free for 3 months for all companies, organizations, government institutions), schools and organizations.

Know where your data is

The hosting of 100% takes place in the Netherlands, with a Dutch company. There is no data that goes through foreign servers or with companies that are under foreign jurisdiction, eliminating for example the risk of the Cloud Act. If you don’t know the Cloud Act: it is a US law signed by President Trump that allows any data managed by a US company, regardless of where that data is, to be handed over by a US court to a company or government agency. And those companies or government agencies do not have to be US companies or governments! For example, the Turkish government could sue for data hosted by a German company on Amazon in Germany and get access to the data.

The short of it

Because The Good Cloud has decided to offer the service temporarily free of charge (for 3 months), companies, schools and institutions, which are now dealing with reduced liquidity and other financial challenges, can still be provided with a privacy-friendly service to work together from home.

For those unfamiliar with what Nextcloud Hub can do, here a short overview.

The Good Cloud offers a complete solution for working at home:

• Share files quickly, easily and securely
• Audio / video chat with mobile apps
• Edit office document with others
• Simple interface in browser and mobile apps
• Automate boring tasks with Flow
• Privacy by design

It has the business capabilities enterprises need to keep their data safe and facilitate their teams to work together.

• Data secured with File Access Control, multi-layered encryption, AI-
  based authentication protection and ransomware recovery
• Manage users locally or with LDAP / AD / SAML and other protocols
• Integration with existing file storage systems such as FTP, Windows Network
  Drive, SharePoint, NFS, Samba and more
• Extends functionality with apps

sign up now!

Informational links:

• Tips from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on collaboration through online tools
• Volkskrant (Dutch) on the ‚digital revolution‘ of working from home
• CNN on teleworking security
• Dutch Trouw on Zoom issues
• Volkskrant (Dutch) on Zoom issues
• Tweakers.net (Dutch) on even more Zoom issues (this list is endless so we’ll stop here with Zoom issues
• Business Insider on slack and data encryption
• Dutch Authoriteit Persoonsgegevens: keuzehulp privacy bij videobel-apps