Four reasons to consolidate collaboration for your online workspace

Is it time to bring all of your online apps together in one digital workspace to work more productively?

With teams using various ways of sharing files, chatting, and managing projects, the security risks and productivity costs are a great motivation to consolidate. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are popular solutions, but Nextcloud Hub is typically chosen when autonomy, control, and compliance are important.

How does Nextcloud Hub compare to continuing to use a fragmented set of tools or rolling out a bundle of different tools, as some vendors offer? Here are the four main reasons to go for an integrated platform for collaboration.

1. Productivity: Can your team members work efficiently?

Two numbers illustrate the difference between Nextcloud Hub and a loose bundling of apps:

• 9,5 minutes. Studies show this is how much time employees lose each time they switch between apps.
• Nearly 1 hour. That is how long the average employee spends searching for the latest version of a file or other information hidden in a different app.

This should not be surprising. The fragmentation and silos that separate applications create are a frustrating barrier, harming employee retention and adoption of new technologies. Yet in Nextcloud Hub, team members will always collaborate on a single document, even when accessing it from different contexts like a chat, project task, calendar invite, or share link.

Our customers have consistently found that, especially when migrating from an integrated platform like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, it is unrealistic to force users into the poor user experience that comes with a fragmented toolset. In contrast, it has been shown countless times that moving to Nextcloud Hub improves user satisfaction and reduces migration friction.

2. Scalability & costs: Can your solution grow with your business’s needs?

Ease of migration and scaling

It is easy to see why administering a suite of eight applications is more complex than one or two, especially when the technology stacks are entirely different. And modern container technologies don’t magically resolve scalability challenges in the real world.

These challenges start at roll-out, where a single platform like Nextcloud Hub is far easier to test and reduces the chance of problems during introduction in the workplace. And while rolling out 100.000 Nextcloud Hub seats is a routine operation for our team, scaling the complex interactions of a dozen applications is the kind of challenge best avoided.

Environmental and financial costs

A complicated stack also multiplies the cost and duration of downtime. With Nextcloud Hub, fewer products are involved, meaning it is easier to pin down the cause of issues, and there is no blame game between vendors, slowing down the resolution time.

These costs not only show in fragility and downtime, but also in performance and resource usage. The multitude of back-end technologies and scaling methods of a typical collaboration bundle easily explode resource usage 4-5 times over that of Nextcloud Hub. For environmentally and cost-sensitive organisations, this is simply not an option.

3. Safety & compliance: Can you easily keep your online workspace secure?

Complexity is also an enemy of security. Every application expands the attack surface of an organization, and the interactions between a large number of applications on a network are hard to monitor, obscuring malicious traffic.

Compliance similarly benefits from having fewer products to certify and monitor. Especially the long term task of Third Party Risk Management is greatly simplified when selecting Nextcloud Hub. All of Nextcloud is 100% open source and AGPL, while application bundles typically feature various open core components and other licensing issues.

Backed by shared ownership

Unlike most other solutions on the market, Nextcloud Hub is developed under a proven shared-ownership model with a majority of code contributors coming from a wide range of customers, partners, the public sector, and private actors.

Compliance in Nextcloud

Nextcloud Enterprise platform simplifies dealing with the complex requirements of privacy regulations, decreasing business risk and costs.

Find out more

4. Maturity: Does your solution have a proven track record?

Perhaps not a technical reason, yet a reality: Nextcloud Hub is, by far, the most deployed sovereign digital workplace. It is proven in production use at nearly 500 public sector organizations at municipal, state, national, and European level with many installations providing hundreds of thousands or even millions of seats. There is massive momentum, for example, in France and the Netherlands.

Similarly, in the educational sector, thousands of schools, universities, and research institutes rely on Nextcloud to enable their teachers, students, and administrative staff to collaborate, reaching tens of millions of students across the world.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of banks, hospitals, and companies of all sizes benefit from the autonomy and control Nextcloud Hub provides, either by hosting in their own private cloud or using an offering from one of Nextcloud’s hosting partners. Some of our partners help a few thousand local businesses run Nextcloud, others offer tens of millions of private users a place to safely store their memories.

From scattered apps to a consolidated solution: Nextcloud Hub

The reality is that in a world where users are more and more used to the integrated collaboration platforms from Microsoft and Google, a loose bundling of separate tools is not a serious long-term solution.

And it shows.

Every month, hundreds of thousands experience Nextcloud Hub for the first time, with a stream of enterprise deployments that regularly exceed the entire installed base of any other individual or bundle of sovereign collaboration apps.

This is the simple consequence of Nextcloud Hub being the easiest way for an organization to regain sovereignty over its digital workplace!