Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) needed a secure, collaborative information repository deployed on-premise to support its large network of thousands of researchers and massive datasets, while keeping sensitive research data fully under institutional control.
After evaluating a number of solutions, CSIC selected Nextcloud because of its open source foundation, active development ecosystem, and ability to deploy a fully sovereign collaboration platform within its existing research infrastructure.
The research organization implemented a centralized research collaboration platform with Nextcloud Files, Talk, Groupware and ONLYOFFICE, integrated with a high-performance (HPC) storage infrastructure. This allows researchers to securely collaborate on large datasets generated by scientific projects.
Today, around 17,000 users collaborate through the platform, each with a 2 TB storage quota, which is in fact one of the largest allocations offered within Spanish public administration. As such, the system has become the organization’s corporate repository for secure research collaboration.
Fragmented research data across external tools, lacking sovereignty, scalability, and secure collaboration for thousands of users.
Centralized on-premise Nextcloud platform enabling sovereign, scalable, and secure collaboration for thousands of researchers.
CSIC is Spain’s largest public research organization, with 16,000 employees and a network of 150 research institutes, centers and unitsacross Spain, playing a central role in the country’s scientific ecosystem.
The organization conducts research across a broad range of disciplines, including humanities, biology, agriculture, physics, materials science and chemistry. Which such a broad spectrum, it is no surprise that its mission is to advance scientific knowledge, foster innovation and transfer research results to industry and society.
CSIC manages major scientific infrastructure and collaborates internationally with research institutions and public organizations. The need to securely store and share the vast volumes of research data is something they couldn’t compromise on.
As mentioned, the organization generates huge amounts of research data within its distributed network of institutes and laboratories. Additionally, researchers needed to collaborate across disciplines and locations while working with sensitive datasets.
Before introducing Nextcloud, the organization faced several challenges, starting with file sharing. Researchers often relied on public cloud platforms, such as Dropbox or Google Drive, which meant that important and possibly sensitive data could end up scattered on several external services. Naturally, this created concerns related to transparency, control, security, regulatory compliance, institutional control over critical research data, and everything else that falls under data sovereignty.
CSIC had also previously used ownCloud, but the platform’s development pace raised concerns about long-term requirements, scalability and being able to maintain a future-proof collaboration environment.
Essentially, the IT team was looking for a solution that could:
CSIC implemented Nextcloud as its corporate collaboration and file sharing platform, deployed on-premise.
The deployment included several key products:
The platform was integrated with IBM high-performance storage infrastructure using the GPFS file system, allowing the system to handle large datasets produced by research projects.
The implementation timeline was approximately two years, gradually onboarding users and integrating the system into the CSIC existing infrastructure.
The effort resulted in a centralized platform that enables researchers within the full scientific ecosystem to collaborate and keep sensitive information fully under the institution’s control.
Today, the extensive research network of 17,000 users collaborate using Nextcloud, the corporate information repository for CSIC. Researchers no longer rely on external cloud services, but instead enjoy a secure and user-friendly environment.
Other key outcomes include:
Additionally, the active development, guided by users’ needs, of Nextcloud, ensures that new capabilities and improvements continue to be introduced regularly. This gives the CSIC confidence that the platform will keep evolving and support their long-term infrastructure needs.
For research institutions, a secure and sovereign collaboration is essential to manage sensitive information and large volumes of data generated across distributed teams. By deploying an open-source platform like Nextcloud, organizations can centralize file sharing and collaboration with full control over their data, helping institutions meet strict regulatory requirements and ensure compliance.
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Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas
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