Shortfacts - April 2020

Secure working from home

More and more organizations and companies are gearing up for working from home on a large scale. However, this presents IT departments with a major challenge: they need to provide employees with convenient and secure external access to company resources.

Functions such as e-mail or calendars are generally not a major problem. The situation is different when it comes to exchanging files and documents. If companies want to give home office employees access to internal network drives, this often requires complex and elaborate VPN constructions.

Content collaboration solutions offer a modern alternative. They make it possible to retrieve and exchange files quickly, easily and independently of end devices through centralized online storage. The temptation to simply rely on public cloud storage services is great.

However, companies are better off staying away from them. These services are generally of US origin and are therefore subject to the US Cloud Act. This relatively new law legitimizes American authorities to demand that operators hand over all of a person's or company's data.

This is not compatible with local data protection regulations such as the GDPR. It is therefore worth taking a closer look at the market. There are alternatives from Germany that enable companies to operate their own content collaboration solutions in secure and data protection-compliant private cloud environments, Owncloud assures.