Nextcloud, IONOS and Viakom announce online collaboration platform for educational institutions, public authorities and SMEs – made in Germany

The Covid-19 crisis has Europe in its grip. Over the last weeks, lots of schools and other organizations have been forced to hastily move to the cloud for online collaboration. The speed has meant that most have not had proper time to analyze and mitigate the risks. The result has been that many organizations have suffered from the many security and privacy problems most proprietary SaaS services bring with them. This poses a huge issue for digital sovereignty in Europe as unprecedented amounts of data are vacuumed up by foreign cloud services and leaked in various incidents.

Nextcloud has been talked about a lot and is getting deployed in many places, but not all organizations have the time and skills to do this themselves. To help them move to a secure solution quickly, Nextcloud has partnered with IONOS and Viakom to offer a fully managed solution with Nextcloud. European-developed, hosted and managed, 100% open source and developed with a privacy first mindset – a collaboration platform schools, governments and businesses can trust.

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The best, together

IONOS is Europe’s largest hosting provider and Viakom is a managed service provider and software development house specialized in ICT deployments for SMB. Together we are announcing the immediate availability of a trusted, Germany-hosted, developed and operated private online collaboration and communication platform for schools, municipalities, and small and medium businesses. The GDPR compliant, fully managed solution can be used for free for 30 days, is priced at 9,5 euro per user per month for the full set of Nextcloud Hub capabilities and deployed within 24 hours. Each customer has its own private instance, managed by Viakom.

This managed Nextcloud fully eliminates the privacy risks and security leaks of foreign SaaS solutions that continue to dominate the news!

Public cloud communication under significant legal risks

Silicon Valley lacks the strong privacy culture and legal framework Europe has. This has become painfully visible in the last weeks as an endless stream of security and privacy breaches in popular public cloud communication and collaboration platforms have been revealed. The digital sovereignty, economic and social future of Europe is threatened by the pervasive use of these solutions and the associated leaking of private and business data. The legal risks for schools, governments and businesses are significant, with the Data Protection Officer of Baden-Württemberg strongly warning against the use of foreign-hosted, Software-as-a-Service technologies and recommending the use of Nextcloud Talk and other open-source, on premise solutions. The Data Protection Office of the German state Hessen went even further and issued a stark warning that the use of Office 365 is not GDPR compliant for schools. Earlier, the Swedes and Dutch came to the same conclusion.

Nextcloud Hub, the full range of services modern organizations need for a remote collaboration

Nextcloud Hub offers easy to use file exchange and collaborative document editing with integrated video chat, webinar, and groupware capabilities, providing a secure alternative to a patchwork of leaking video conferencing and file sharing platforms in the public cloud. Hosted in the trusted and security-certified German data centers of IONOS and protected and managed by the capable engineers of Viakom, the combined offering delivers the full range of services modern organizations need to collaborate remotely during the Corona crisis.

Covid-19: A fundamental change

Covid-19 is set to fundamentally change work in many organizations. Working with colleagues remotely, both from the home office or offices in other countries is now the norm. Public institutions, schools, and companies will have to deal with being permanently online and providing cloud services as part of managed services to their users. While public cloud services have been a temporary fix, their fundamental downsides require organizations to quickly seek out and deploy more secure, locally hosted and managed solutions. With a Viakom-managed Nextcloud platform on IONOS’ leading infrastructure, that trusted, secure and easy solution is now available.

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The offering comes with a 30 day free trial period and starts at 9.50 euros per user per month with discounts for educational and government use.

Digital sovereignty for Europe starts here.

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What is Nextcloud?

Nextcloud offers the most deployed on premise content collaboration platform. Nextcloud Hub combines the convenience and ease of use of consumer-grade solutions like Dropbox and Google Apps with the security, privacy and control business needs.

Nextcloud integrates powerful capabilities to control and monitor data exchange and communication with File Access Control and workflow features, extensive audit logs, fine-grained sharing controls, multi-layered encryption and more. Nextcloud is designed to integrate deeply in existing infrastructure, with support for a wide variety of storage, database, user management and authentication solutions.

With over 300.000 server installations and tens of millions of end users, Nextcloud is the undisputed leader in the on premise collaboration space and features prominent customers in nearly every vertical from banks and hospitals to government and manufacturing all over the world.

Nextcloud Products

• Nextcloud Files offers universal file access on desktop, mobile and web. Find files with powerful search, share your thoughts in comments or lock files until you are done with them.
• Nextcloud Talk delivers on premise, private audio/video conferencing and text chat through browser and mobile interfaces with integrated screen sharing and SIP integration.
• Nextcloud Groupware integrates Calendar, Contacts, Mail and other productivity features to help teams get their work done faster, easier and on your terms.

Nextcloud Hub integrates the three products with real-time office document editing in one collaborative platform.

Key features of Nextcloud Hub:

• Extensive document sharing internally and through public links with web and mobile interfaces
• Built in audio/video chat with mobile apps
• Real-time collaborative office document editing, in browser and mobile apps
• Calendar, mailing, task management and contacts handling built in
• Access existing storage silos like FTP, Windows Network Drives, SharePoint, Object Storage and Samba shares seamlessly through Nextcloud.
• Manage users locally or authenticate through LDAP / Active Directory, Kerberos and Shibboleth / SAML 2.0 and more
• Secure data with powerful file access control, multi-layer encryption, machine-learning based authentication protection and advanced ransomware recovery capabilities
• Enable users to automate repetitive tasks and optimize business processes with Flow
• Extend Nextcloud further with a wide variety of apps on our app store or build your own

See Nextcloud Hub in action

Watch these videos for an overview of what Nextcloud Hub can do for you!