This is a little dated but I thought it was interesting none-the-less. In December, we announced a terrific deal with TERENA, the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association. Essentially, TERENA endorsed ownCloud to its community — securing favored pricing for its 41 national members and their constituencies, encompassing more than 50 million potential users. Pretty cool huh?
Well, those members have been coming to ownCloud to take advantage. As part of the announcement we highlighted SWITCH. As a partner of Swiss universities, SWITCH brought the Internet to Switzerland more than 25 years ago. Today, the non-profit organization with 100 employees at its headquarters in Zurich develops Internet services for lecturers, researchers, students, as well as for commercial customers. SWITCH stands for security and stability of the Swiss Internet.
We recently found that SWITCH wrote up the issue in their Journal (Page 28/29). Author Patrik Schnellmann lays out the threat of consumer-grade cloud file sync and share for universities – and enterprises in general.
“Simply admonishing and educating users about privacy and legal concerns does not help to improve the situation. Providing a safe and secure alternative to synchronize and share files is the smarter way. With this in mind, university IT departments asked SWITCH to take up this idea in its innovation process. Following the innovation process, SWITCH specified the requirements for a Dropbox-like service together with the IT departments.”
There are some great data in the piece as well as a nice solution (ownCloud of course). It’s worth a read.
