European Research and Education Association Terena Endorses ownCloud

TERENA, the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association, and ownCloud, Inc. announced that TERENA has endorsed ownCloud to its community by securing favored pricing for its 41 national members and their constituencies, encompassing more than 50 million potential users.

With more than a million users worldwide, ownCloud offers the flexibility, privacy and security unmatched by consumer-grade services. It installs on a web server, enabling institutions to host their own file sync and share, giving IT control of their data whether using on-premises or cloud storage.

TERENA offers a forum to collaborate, innovate and share knowledge in order to foster the development of Internet technology, infrastructure and services to be used by the research and education community.

“TERENA’s task force on storage solutions (TF-Storage) looked at many alternatives of which ownCloud offered the unique combination of on-premises, integrated software (for compliance, control and privacy), open source (for openness and extensibility) and storage agnosticism (for flexibility and cost savings),” said Péter Szegedi, project development officer, TERENA. “With the favored pricing negotiated with ownCloud, TERENA’s national and international members, including universities and other institutes within their constituencies, get a cost-effective, secure, compliant way to share their data world-wide and deploy private cloud infrastructure based on ownCloud technology.”

TERENA members SWITCH and SURFnet will be first to incorporate ownCloud into the services offered to their members and users.

As a partner of the Swiss universities, SWITCH brought the Internet to Switzerland more than 25 years ago. The non-profit organization with 100 employees at its HQs 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.

SURFnet, providing connectivity to a million users in the Netherlands, ensures that researchers, instructors, and students can work together simply and effectively with the aid of ICT. It is the driving force behind ICT-based innovation in higher education and research in the Netherlands, promoting, developing, and operating a trusted, connecting ICT infrastructure.

“ownCloud is rapidly becoming the favored file sync and share solution for research and education,” said Steve Green, VP sales, ownCloud. “Research and educational institutions face many regulatory and legal hurdles and have incredibly sensitive data. Only by controlling how end users share that data can they leap those hurdles.”