Last week, IONOS and Nextcloud announced that schools in Germany opted for Nextcloud. This week, it’s Swiss universities: Earlier this year, the non-profit foundation of the Swiss universities Switch migrated to Nextcloud within 32 hours. 39,500 students, teachers and researchers at 65 organizations, with a total volume of 585 terabytes of data moved from a legacy solution to Nextcloud. And it happened over just a weekend.
At a time of criticism of Microsoft’s new education licensing changes, Switzerland joins the growing number of schools, universities and research institutions opting for a secure, privacy-respecting environment for learning, collaboration and file exchange.
The Swiss universities join the ranks of educational institutions globally using Nextcloud, such as Sorbonne University in France and TU Berlin in Germany, as well as universities in Austria, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Japan.
The French Ministry of Education already provides the software to 500,000 users and plans to expand it to 1.2 million employees. Over 550,000 students, teachers, and administrative staff across hundreds of high schools in the Paris metropolitan area, Île-de-France, use Nextcloud, replacing solutions from Microsoft, and similar deployments are underway.
Avoid the ever-spiraling costs of big tech and benefit from sovereignty
The motivation of educational institutions might vary. It can be lowering costs, especially with Microsoft cancelling the Student Use Benefit, their bundling, or Google forcing AI on schools. Universities may want to be in control of their data. Or a mix of the above. And to be clear: These are all perfect reasons.
Especially for universities, large amounts of storage can be required for research data, where local storage typically comes with quite a cost benefit.
But it‘s not all about pricing: Switch chooses Nextcloud over Microsoft or Google for sovereignty reasons. And many other universities value academic freedom and would not want their data to be held hostage, too.
Migration: all it takes is the will and a good plan
Switch knew that the migration is not just about moving but also about sorting through the past 12 years. So before the migration, Switch created a new design for Switch Drive, deleted inactive user accounts, and updated configuration parameters, which did not have any documentation. Data, files, folders, shares, and permissions remained unchanged.
The migration itself was conducted after thorough planning over the weekend, from Friday to Sunday, to reduce the downtime for users to a minimum. Except for the service interruption over the weekend, the users only needed to log in on Monday to continue working. Even the pre-existing sync client worked. The best migration is the one nobody notices. Well, except for a way faster service after the migration.
« Migration is too hard » is the most expensive excuse in IT. The migration effort is often overestimated, while the risks of dependency are underestimated. As a consequence, contracts are being renewed because switching is perceived as riskier than dependency.
We also often find that an “all or nothing” mindset raises the bar. In practice, large parts of a digital workplace can often be migrated relatively quickly. Nextcloud is an integrated platform but has a modular design. Customers can start with Nextcloud Files to edit and share documents and then later use Nextcloud Groupware for managing emails, calendars, and contacts, and then Nextcloud Office or Talk for chat and videoconferencing.
Migration is not an impossible challenge. It’s a manageable process. What it takes is the will and a good plan. Switch had both.
More information on Nextcloud in education: https://nextcloud.com/education.
