Major Workflow Disruptions with COVID-19

The global crisis with COVID-19 has disrupted normal work patterns, modes of communication and team dynamics – forcing a major shift to online collaboration. As a result, almost every business, school, and organization have abruptly implemented work from home and remote solutions. Unfortunately, with the unexpected rate at which government shutdown orders were mandated globally, many did not have sufficient time to find proper solutions to keep them connected and their data secure. 

For example, Dr. Michele Bordi, IT Systems Administrator, for the Municipality of Macerata, recently shared at the Nextcloud Conference 2020, how his team had swiftly moved to implement Nextcloud as a solution to his team efficient during work-from-home measures while keeping the local government running amidst the COVID-19 pandemic that was gripping not only Macerata, but the entire world.

Macerata is a city in central Italy with 43 thousand inhabitants. Before the pandemic, employees worked with a personal home directory and shared data between 10 departments and other business units, for a total of 8 terabytes of files.

Before the pandemic, Covid-19 had already been experimenting for almost a year in the municipality with a "smart working" solution, making 25 employees work from home for one day a week.

The employees worked with their personal computers connected to the office computer via direct access from SMB shares via a VPN connection. The solution was great for a small workgroup, as it was easy for employees to understand, even if it needs time to set-up. But this solution would not have been enough if all 250 employees in the municipality start to work from home 6 days a week, which happened with Covid-19's pandemic. 

So, in order to don't stop their assistance to the citizens during the pandemic, they needed an efficient, easy and quick solution to implement for every worker from home and intuitive for everyone, so they could have access to their own and office data in a secure way.

Since they already have a cloud manager included in their system. So, they just needed to allow their employees access to their data safely.

Some of the features of NextCloud had already been tried and tested, so all they needed to do was configure it so all users could access the data safely. The configuration was simple and more intuitive, they were able to give every employee access to their personal homedir based on userID. The organizational units were able to share files securely and with certified authorization. 

Dr. Bordi said that: "NextCloud gave its employees the opportunity to be ready to work from home in less than a week with minimal impact on their infrastructure and finances" and thanks to the intuitive interface the learning curve remained low and the goal of working during the Covid emergency was achieved.

How to Keep Your Data Secure

When it comes to virtual collaboration and data privacy Nextcloud is hard to beat. Apps like Nextcloud Talk have received praise from international agencies for its approach to privacy! We are happy to announce that AmberPRO now supports Nextcloud – via Docker integration. 

AmberPRO, by LatticeWork, offers a self-hosted solution – eliminating major risks for users who no longer have to compromise between convenience and privacy. As an Edge Computing Platform, AmberPRO can run the Nextcloud container, which includes the privacy-friendly Nextcloud Talk. A perfect solution for all companies, organizations, government institutions, and schools – during the macro trend towards remote work and collaboration. We also support numerous other open-source solutions available via Docker. 

Take Control

More than just a container, AmberPRO is a Smart Storage Platform that allows you to keep all your data in a physical location while allowing remote access via our Personal Hybrid Cloud – putting you in full control of your data from anywhere. 

Modern public cloud services store your data in multiple locations across multiple countries. Begging the question, who owns your data? 

AmberPRO eliminates the ambiguity and helps you Bring Your Data Home™. 

·       Data secured with File Access Control, multi-layered encryption, authentication protection and ransomware recovery.

·       Integration with existing file storage systems such as FTP, Windows Network Drive, NFS, Samba and more.

·       Easy file sharing across the Amber Cloud user base + beyond the Nextcloud user domain.