Sorbonne University deployed Nextcloud as a sovereign, on-premises solution to move away from Microsoft and Google, ensuring full control over data for more than 10,000 staff members and 55,000 students.
Nextcloud, implemented with the support of Nextcloud partner Arawa, provided an intuitive, scalable solution, that now stores 40 TB of data and delivers seamless collaboration through Nextcloud Files, Nextcloud Office, and integrated apps. The platform fully meets Sorbonne’s open-source ambitions and keeps user accounts, storage and infrastructure under internal IT management.
Looking ahead, the University plans to expand Nextcloud to all its students, increase storage capacity, migrate to object storage, and activate additional Nextcloud apps to continue to improve campus-wide collaboration.
Sorbonne University needed to provide 15,000 employees with secure cloud storage and file sharing that maintained data sovereignty and offered an alternative to Google and Microsoft suites.
Nextcloud Hub deployed on Sorbonne’s own infrastructure with OnlyOffice integration, load-balanced application servers, and LDAP/SSO authentication to deliver sovereign cloud storage for thousands of staff members.
Sorbonne University is a French university located in Paris, France. In 2018, the universities of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris-IV), now the Faculty of Arts, and Pierre-et-Marie-Curie (Paris-VI) now the Faculty of Science and Medicine were merged into the Sorbonne we know today.
Sorbonne University is one of the successors of the University of Paris founded in 1896. It is organized into three faculties spread across 26 sites mainly in the Latin Quarter (Quartier Latin) and there’s even a campus in Abu Dhabi.
In 2019, Sorbonne University had 55,600 students including 10,200 international students and 6,700 researchers.
As part of its digitalization policy, Sorbonne University provides its users with personal cloud storage based on open source products hosted on its own infrastructure.
This project was dubbed ‘DropSU’ and was initiated at the end of 2019 as part of a digital policy plan. The project is rooted in the notion that Sorbonne University’s staff (15,000 employees) needed a way to store and share their documents online similar to other file sync and share services.
Sorbonne University’s users including researchers, students and staff were often accustomed to using services from Google, Amazon and Microsoft to share their data and documents for personal use.
Therefore, before introducing Nextcloud, they needed to define key pros and cons about implementing a new solution and how their users would react and process the change.
Pros:
Cons:
At the application level, Nextcloud Hub is used for storage and document sharing. Within Nextcloud Hub, extendible menus provide Nextcloud apps and collaborative plugins integrated with OnlyOffice to enable collaborative document editing.
At the middleware and database layer it runs Redis, Galera, RabbitMQ and Postgres. The infrastructure level consists of 12 production servers, 4 application servers for load balancing (for Nextcloud), a Galera cluster with 3 databases, 3 Redis databases (for Nextcloud) and 2 MaxScale SQL proxies combined with a cluster of OnlyOffice in active/passive mode on 2 application servers.
There is also a tight integration with directory services (LDAP) and authentication services (SSO viaLemonLDAP/SAML) for account provisioning and authentication management.
The project was a success and within two years Nextcloud Hub (DropSU) reached several thousand active accounts for the University staff alone and the service stored 40TB of data.
Overall, Nextcloud was able to achieve all of Sorbonne’s requirements including providing an easy-to-use digital platform, satisfying their data sovereignty policy and curating an open source technical architecture.
The technical architecture was set up with the help of Arawa, a Gold Partner of Nextcloud. Arawa also assists the University with the maintenance and support of Nextcloud Hub.
Looking forward, the University of Sorbonne aims to:
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Customer
Sorbonne University
Partner
Arawa
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