This marks a milestone for around 20 universities and universities of applied sciences in North Rhine-Westphalia: On 2 February, they will jointly launch the non-commercial cloud service ‘sciebo’. This service – one of the largest of its kind in Germany – enables students and researchers to handle even large volumes of data securely.
The participating universities run ‘sciebo’ independently. The data is processed exclusively at three universities in North Rhine-Westphalia: in Münster, where the project is managed, as well as in Bonn and Duisburg-Essen. As ‘sciebo’ is based in North Rhine-Westphalia, it is subject to the German Data Protection Act – one of the strictest in the world.
“With most commercial cloud services, the data is stored on servers abroad. This is often accompanied by lax data protection regulations and opaque terms of use,” emphasises Dr Raimund Vogl, Head of the Centre for Information Processing at the University of Münster (WWU). “This makes these services unsuitable for handling sensitive data.” Raimund Vogl is the consortium leader of “sciebo” and is responsible for the launch and operation of the service, which was developed under the working title “Sync & Share NRW”.
“sciebo” (pronounced: Skie-Boh) is a coined word, inspired by the Latin verb scire, which means “to know” or “to be able to”. However, the name can also be read as an abbreviation for “Science Box”, thus referring to its nature as a campus cloud. The “sciebo” logo – a green elephant – symbolises attributes associated with both the animal and the new cloud service: among other things, a good (data) memory, great resilience as a beast of burden – or, in other words, a high data capacity – and a natural aptitude as a ‘herd animal’, i.e. for a large user group.
‘sciebo’ enables the automatic synchronisation of data across various devices, such as PCs and smartphones. The service also allows different users to collaborate on the same documents. Each participant has 30 gigabytes of free storage space at their disposal, with significantly more available for research projects as required. The total storage capacity is five petabytes – equivalent to around one million DVD films.
The cloud service is available exclusively to members of the participating higher education institutions. A few institutions have decided to offer ‘sciebo’ initially only to their staff or only to their students. The project is funded by the State of North Rhine-Westphalia with around 2.8 million euros.
Participating universities and universities of applied sciences:
Universities:
University of Münster (project lead), RWTH Aachen University, University of Bonn, German Sport University Cologne, University of Cologne, University of Duisburg-Essen, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, University of Siegen, FernUniversität Hagen, University of Paderborn, Bergische University Wuppertal
Universities of Applied Sciences:
Bochum University of Applied Sciences, Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Dortmund University of Applied Sciences, University of Health Sciences, Westphalian University of Applied Sciences, Gelsenkirchen, Cologne University of Applied Sciences, Münster University of Applied Sciences, Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences, Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences
Further information on sciebo – the Campuscloud – can be found at www.sciebo.de
