sciebo — theCampuscloud for NRW

More than two years after its conception and after intensive preparatory work, a large scale cloud service for the academic community in the German state of North Rhine-Westfalia (NRW) has become operational at the beginning of February 2015. Under the brand name “sciebo — theCampuscloud” (derived from “science box”), the sync & share NRW project (Vogl et al. 2013, Walter et al. 2014) is now ready for the registration of potentially 350,000 users from 22 (out of 33) research and applied science universities in NRW. A powerful system platform with five Petabyte of net storage space and 77 servers, hosted at three university data centers providing sync & share cloud storage in compliance with German data protection legislation, has been set up, elaborate contractual frameworks have been developed, scientific studies for preparation and evaluation have been and will subsequently be conducted and a mainly student driven state-wide marketing campaign has been staged. Just ten days after its launch, sciebo has already found 5,000 users and functionality, performance and availability have been well received. Starting with the much anticipated data privacy compliant sync & share functionality, sciebo offers the potential to become a more general cloud platform for collaboration and research data management which will be actively pursued in upcoming scientific and infrastructural projects.