Secure file exchange

Keep your IT compliant with Nextcloud

A recent Forrester report notes that unsecured and uncontrolled sharing of data opens the door to loss of version control, auditability, and control over innovative IP, creating business and legal risks.

Seventy-five percent of companies (…) rely on email for file sharing and collaboration, while more than half use FTP sites.

More studies show the risks of an uncontrolled SaaS strategy.

Public consumer clouds are risky. A McAfee survey showed that 25% of organizations using public cloud suffered data theft.

A Code42 study concluded employers fail to stop employees from syncing company files to personal cloud accounts.

A study by Veritas Technologies shows the wild growth in SaaS services multiplies the cost of ransomware attacks.

With all these risks, it is not illogical to see 70% of enterprises planning to move one or more SaaS applications back on-premises.

Forrester urges senior corporate management and IT professionals to shift away from ad-hoc solutions like email, outdated technologies like FTP or customer-grade file sync and share like Dropbox or Google Drive. Key requirements they identify for a solution include:

Enterprise-grade security, with governance and policies to protect valuable content and code
Ease of use, working in familiar apps such as email to avoid disruption and adoption challenges
APIs for integration with engineering, support desk, and other essential work processes

The goal should be to streamline productivity without sacrificing visibility into the distribution of digital knowledge assets.

Get started today!

Enhance employee productivity and increase cost efficiency with the market-leading on-premises content collaboration platform.

Current ‘solution’: email

Over half of the teams managed by respondents is reported to use public, consumer grade file sharing services and email to share code, patches and other intellectual property within the organization as well as with customers. Forrester notes that these solutions neither protect intellectual property and competitive advantage but also offer little control or rights management, nor audit and tracking controls.

And indeed, the McAfee survey shows data loss and theft occur regularly. Worse, targetted ransomware attacks are on the rise and the average cost to businesses is growing even faster. Change is needed.

Concerns about new technologies
But introducing a new technology can be disruptive. A key concern cited by 72% of the respondents is the creation of new content silos. Having to migrate data and manage it in a new location, the goals of simplifying work flows while strengthening governance will not be achieved.

DPIA commisioned by the Dutch government shows a series of issues in Office 365

Office 365 not GDPR compliant

Use of Office 365 adds significantly to compliance risks. Like many other SaaS solutions, it, fails to follow the requirements and risk business data as a Data Protection Impact Assesment of Office 365 by the Dutch government showed again in mid 2020. This after serious flaws were found and promised to be fixed first in early 2019 and again later that year. Legal challenges are mounted continuously and can cause significant harm.

Links:

10 issues with data silos

Employees in modern organizations use tens, sometimes dozens different online services for tracking tasks, tickets, managing blogs, updating documentation, editing files, communicating with partners and more. But this outgrowth of IT services complicates work and multiplies the risk of data leaks.

5x inefficiency and waste of time

1. Tools don’t connect so data is uploaded to multiple places and employees lose track of what is where

2. More different services means more frequent service disruption that blocks employees from working

3. Each tool has a different user interface, requiring more of training and causing mistakes

4. Nobody knows who has access to what tool and who manages which accounts

5. The IT department loses track of the services and ends up paying for unused accounts

5x security risks

1. Uploading data to multiple platforms means multiplying the risk of a data breach

2. Loss of visibility and ability to track where data is and who has access

3. Complicated reporting on data breach causes compliance issues

4. Central or connected authentication and storage means breach in one is breach in all

5. Password re-use by employees across platforms means even a breach in a low-risk service risks all

A real solution

By providing businesses a self hosted file access, sync and share solution with powerful integration in existing infrastructure and storage solutions, Nextcloud makes data available to users wherever it is. No need for new storage solutions or moving all data over. Easy integration and quick deployment brings organizations immediately in a compliant, secure state.

Secure with a low barrier to entry
Its familiar, easy to use interface on web, mobile and desktop allows users to work efficiently and be confident everybody has access to the same, latest version of data. Its enterprise capabilities ensure IT maintains full control over sharing, retention and availability of data within and across the boundaries of the organization.

Decentralized and hybrid
Last but not least, Nextcloud is a perfect fit for a Hybrid Cloud strategy, enabling universal access to data irrespective of where it is stored: on an internal network, in the cloud or even at a partner. Through Global Scale, it is possible to host multiple separate Nextcloud servers to ensure data locality rules are while inter-server sharing and encryption of unsafe storage ensure data is both safe and seamlessly accessible at all times.

Key benefits

Why self-hosting?

Simply keeping your data behind your company firewall rather than in the cloud makes compliance and security easy.

With Nextcloud, you don’t lose the benefits of modern cloud collaboration and team productivity!

Why file sync and share?

Your FTP or Windows Network Drive simply don’t suffice – employees work around, rather than with them, using Dropbox and other unsafe solutions.

Nextcloud puts your IT back in control over your data.

Why Nextcloud?

Nextcloud provides an unique combination of security and control over data without compromising usability.

Being open source means no vendor lock in and an unprecedented degree of integration in enterprise infrastructure.

Future-ready: built in collaboration

Gartner typically calls solutions in this space Enterprise File Sync and Share or EFSS. In the last years, the market has been moving on to providing a next generation EFSS, called Content Collaboration Platform, integrating online document editing, communication and planning capabilities complementing the file exchange technologies.

Nextcloud is a leading vendor in this new space, offering these capabilities with Nextcloud Groupware and Nextcloud Talk, delivering seamless communication features integrated in Files. Users can attach a note to shares, comment on files, open a chat or even start a call directly, connecting files to these conversations to keep track of it all. Integrated email and calendaring connect projects and teams to the files they work with, and with Deck, Nextcloud provides a kanban board app which works together with all those.

Rather than tacked on after-the-fact through an external or third-party app that simply opens a new browser tab, Nextcloud has collaboration truly integrated. Watch the short video to see how a text editing session with chat and a video call on the side works.

All these functions are available on-the-go and work across organizational boundaries, allowing users to self-manage thanks to built in support for creating guest accounts by users as well as public sharing links that require no login but can be protected by a password.

Your advantages

No new data silos

Modern organizations have data in a wide variety of silos like Sharepoint, Windows Network Drives, FTP sites and (often without knowledge of management) Dropbox or Google Drive. Nextcloud acts as a single file access, sync and share layer across all these storage systems, integrating with enterprise native account handling like LDAP or SAML.

That does not exclude using public cloud, nor requires you to give up on data locality. Nextcloud fits perfectly in a hybrid cloud strategy, enabling access to data on Amazon S3 and other public storage technologies. Even cutting-edge Blockchain storage technologies like Storj.io and Sia.tech are available to augment storage at extremely low cost.

Under IT’s control

No matter the storage solution used, Nextcloud can ensure corporate policies are followed. Sharing can be restricted through the file firewall, filtering on user properties like location or group, or file properties like (automatically or manually) assigned tags, file type and more. Extensive sharing permissions and restrictions are available, as are Access Control Lists for shared folder structures. With storage transparent to users, generic data can remain where it is while IT can make sure that business critical or compliance-relevant information is stored on internal infrastructure and does not leave the company. Use our secure File Drop to let customers upload files to you in a easy and secure way!

With uniquely layered encryption

Nextcloud offers a supremely easy to use, well integrated file sync and share solution with an uniquely layered approach to security. Together with the support for nearly any storage technology, it features server-side encryption and offers the ability to employ end-to-end, client side encryption for a subset of user files. Rather than making it an either-or choice, your business can rely on utmost security where it is needed but keep collaborative online document editing and full-text search on the server over the rest of the stored data.

At global scale and ensuring data locality

Our unique Global Scale technology enables multiple Nextcloud instances to work as one, enabling enterprises to maintain multiple locations. Local regulations to ensure data locality can be satisfied without user impact and scaling to millions of users can be done cost-effectively.

Designed for the real world

Users can access data on a FTP drive shared with another company; while data stored on an external object storage could be encrypted using server-side encryption so the storage provider has no way to compromise their security.

Meanwhile, files from the HR department are always enforced to be end-to-end encrypted on their clients, protecting their files from even the worst case of a full server breach.

In the back-end, IT can use a mix of local NFS or SharePoint storage, public S3 compatible storage and even blockchain technology to find the perfect mix between performance, reliability, security and cost.

The layered approach to security makes sure users have the maximum amount of productivity in their web interface while making sure sensitive data receives the ultimate protection, client-to-client. Keeping it all in a single solution simplifies management and avoids mistakes from users or IT departments that might cause costly data leaks.