German government moves to open source private cloud

The German federal government is moving to an open source, self-hosted cloud platform from Nextcloud for file sync and sharing and collaboration, in order to protect the data of its citizens.

The Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund), which takes care of IT services for the entire federal government, has been running a pilot of 5000 users with Nextcloud since October 2016 and after a successful tender this will now be rolled out everywhere.

ITZBund operates IT Services for over one million administrative and industrial users. In choosing an open source solution from a European company it ensures no vendor lock-in and no access by any third party to the data. Because the cloud is entirely private it's 100 percent under ITZBund's control and there's no risk of data leakage. As you would expect the solution is fully GDPR compliant.

Nextcloud offers improved productivity without the loss of control over data location and access associated with public clouds, making it an attractive option for government use.

"Nextcloud is more secure than a public cloud solution because you can run our software in its own data center that you trust, and anyone can inspect the code, check for security vulnerabilities, anytime, anywhere and change if necessary," Nextcloud managing director Frank Karlitschek told Der Spiegel.

You can find more information about the deal on the Nextcloud blog.

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