Swiss universities migrate to Nextcloud over one weekend

The non-profit foundation of the Swiss universities Switch migrated to Nextcloud during the weekend of August 21-23. In under 32 hours, 39.500 students, teachers and researchers at 65 organizations with a total volume of 585 terabyte of data were moved from a legacy solution to Nextcloud over the weekend.

With Switch Drive, the foundation offers the Swiss university community a secure alternative to commercial cloud storage services, hosted in their own data centers. Files can be stored, accessed on desktop and mobile devices, shared and collaboratively edited – quickly and reliably. Switch Drive can be easily operated via browser, desktop sync client or mobile app.

Switch decided to migrate to Nextcloud to continue to provide a reliable and modern user experience, improve the performance, security and stability of the service. Switch choose Nextcloud over Microsoft or Google for sovereignty reasons. The foundation wants to better support future developments and enhancements for Switch Drive.

The foundation 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 document. Data, files, folders, shares and permissions remained unchanged.

The migration itself was conducted after thorough planning on a weekend from Friday to Sunday to reduce the downtime for users to a minimum.

„The best migration is the one nobody notices,“ said Gianluca Caratsch, Service Owner & DevOps Engineer at Switch. „Except for the service interruption over the weekend, the users only needed to login on Monday to continue working. Even the old ownCloud sync client worked. We of course recommend to install the new sync clients. Users reported that the service was way faster after the migration.“

„Switch Drive aims to offer the greatest possible digital sovereignty to exercise their roles in the digital world independently, autonomously and securely. We are proud to make that happen,“ said Frank Karlitschek, CEO and co-founder at Nextcloud. „‘Migration is too hard‘ is the most expensive excuse in IT. What it takes is the will and a good plan. Switch had both. Now their users benefit from a greatly improved daily collaboration!“

About Switch Drive

Switch Drive offers the Swiss university community a secure alternative to commercial cloud storage services. Users can save, synchronise, share and collaboratively edit files quickly and reliably. Switch Drive can be operated conveniently via browser, desktop client or mobile app. The academic cloud storage service differs from other well-known offerings in one key respect: Switch Drive runs entirely in the Switch Cloud. This is connected to the university network and access is AAI-protected. All IT resources and usage data are located in Switch data centres. In this way, we take the security needs of university members into account in the best possible way. More information about Switch Drive: https://www.switch.ch/en/drive. 

About Nextcloud

Nextcloud is the world’s most popular privacy-focused collaboration platform. It is used by tens of thousands of private and public organizations and tens of millions of private individuals to stay in control of their sensitive data and ensure privacy compliance.

With Nextcloud, users can edit and share documents, chat and hold video conferences, and manage emails, contacts and calendars via easy web and mobile apps. The open source software has a modular design and can be extended with hundreds of apps. It runs on premises in a private cloud or with a trusted provider.

Founded in 2016, Nextcloud is fully German-owned and has grown organically ever since. Learn more at www.nextcloud.com.

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Phone: +49 (0) 171 121 7528

pr@nextcloud.com