David against Goliath: How a University Cloud Succeeds in the Niche of Higher Education – a User Survey

Abstract

In the discussion about digital sovereignty, an important goal of the EU, there is always the fear that no one would stand a chance against the big giants from the U.S. which dominate the cloud market thanks to early starts, huge resources and network effects. However, the state-funded open source project “sciebo” proves the opposite, at least in the higher education sector. High data protection is a central argument for using a private cloud service at universities, but this alone does not make it competitive. University-specific functions and integrations – for example in the area of digital teaching or research data management – can be a unique selling point, but for a majority of students and employees the basic sync and share functions seem to be sufficient. So how can a university cloud service compete with commercial offers and what can make it successful in the long term? In a cloud landscape dominated by big players like Microsoft, Apple or Google, who move their established services to the cloud and encourage customers to also use their cloud storage with the arguments of a central account and seamless linkage with their other products, this question needs to be addressed to those at the front line: the users. To investigate the above question, we conducted a user survey, taking the university cloud service “sciebo” as an example, which has been in use at numerous higher education institutions in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia since 2015.