Nextcloud pilot: participation open again

The pilot ran from 1 January to 31 December 2026, but has now been extended until the end of 2027. In January 2027, there will be an additional opportunity for SURF members and institutions that are not members but do use SURF’s services to join. Around 30 institutions from higher education, higher professional education, senior secondary vocational education and research are taking part, with a total of approximately 2000 users.

This pilot offers institutions a flexible and secure way to explore federative collaboration tools, try out alternatives for big tech and secure cloud storage for education and research.

Practical experience for a well-informed decision

Thanks to this expansion and extension, we can gain more practical experience with even more institutions and end users. This gives us the time to investigate more thoroughly whether, and in what way, this open collaboration environment can develop into a permanent facility for education and research.

To this end, we wish to answer a number of fundamental questions, such as: what role should the environment play in the longer term? Will it replace the current systems, serve as a contingency measure, or will we use different solutions in parallel? How do we organise collaboration and the development of expertise within the SURF cooperative? And how do we arrange the funding? This will enable us to reach a well-informed decision on possible service development.