The cost pressure in many companies is high. Energy crisis, shortage of skilled workers and the need to digitalize force enterprises to revise existing processes and products. To be innovative and competitive, IT must ensure that data is managed securely and made available flexibly. Cloud technologies are a real game-changer for this. But when developing a cloud strategy, one needs to be careful to avoid the trap of proprietary solutions that make interoperability and data migration difficult.
ownCloud presents three major advantages that companies receive from a sustainable, system-open, and thus future-oriented data strategy.
Transparency. To be able to make a confident decision about cloud offerings, companies need one thing above all: transparent information that shows how the data is processed, where it is stored and what access rights are available. U.S. public clouds do not offer this transparency, as federal and state representatives explicitly stated at the data protection conference in November 2022.
By using U.S. public clouds, companies lose control over the data stored in the cloud and cannot guarantee data protection compliance to their stakeholders. Especially when processing personal data, for example in customer management, serious DSGVO violations quickly arise in this way. In contrast to U.S. cloud solutions, many European cloud solutions are open source-based and thus offer the greatest possible transparency and open standards.
Legal certainty. By using European cloud providers, companies ensure that their data is processed in accordance with European law. This is an important difference compared to non-European providers, who are not obliged to comply with European data protection requirements. Government authorities, for example, can force them to share data. The consequence: companies based in Germany must be liable for these data protection violations. Fortunately, there is now a wide range of European solutions that are user-friendly and multifunctional, while also being able to ensure DSGVO compliance and legal certainty.
Sustainability. More and more stakeholders are demanding Green IT from companies – customers are looking for sustainable products, employees for responsible employers. In addition, the EU is tightening its legal requirements: From the beginning of 2024, the CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive) will require companies to list specific CSR measures in their sustainability reports. One verifiable measure is green cloud services.
Companies benefit here from cooperation with European cloud providers because they do not have to blindly trust any CSR certificates, but can select applications openly in terms of their energy efficiency. For example, through file management that stores metadata directly with files and thus saves the operation of a database server, or through modern provisioning methods such as microservices that make optimal use of hardware resources.
Holger Dyroff, COO and Co-Founder, ownCloud
“The ease of scalability and the discontinuation of support for on-premises applications have driven many companies to the public clouds of US providers in recent years,” explains Holger Dyroff, Co-Founder and COO of ownCloud.
“But there are good reasons to rethink this strategy and use the open source clouds of European providers. These offer more transparency and legal certainty and thus simplify the implementation of sustainability goals.”
