German data protection organization: use of Office 365 in schools is illegal

The data protection officer of the German federal state of Hessen has warned that the cloud-based Office 365 solution is not a compliant solution for use in schools when student information is being stored on it. This fits with earlier, similar conclusions by the Swedish and Dutch governments – US cloud solutions are not GDPR compliant.

EU needs to take action

In a recent op-ed on the EU’s Open Source Observatory, we urged the EU to take the lead against the tech giants which are using and exploiting EU data. As we also argued earlier in our public letter against the EU Copyright directive, all that data being handed to foreign tech giants isn’t only a privacy and security issue but also weakens the EU tech industry, making it harder to compete especially in data-driven new areas like Artificial Intelligence.

Nextcloud offers the leading solution

Thousands of schools, universities and research institutes all over Europe are already using Nextcloud, and more are deploying every day. The Nextcloud Education Edition offers a full collaboration platform for students, teachers and researchers that is cross-platform, easy to use and complete with planning, communication and file exchange and editing all built in. Deep integration with e-learning solutions like Moodle and others as well as extensive authentication support like native SAML and the ability to make available data in existing storage pools like Windows Network Drives make Nextcloud a solution that fits seamlessly with existing platforms.

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