Six German States Select Nextcloud for Sovereign School Cloud

By Amara Osei

Six German states have selected a four-year school cloud that IONOS will set up, migrate and operate, with the platform hosted exclusively in German data centers. Local districts will join voluntarily.

KoDaS—short for the German term “Kollaborations- und Dateiablagesystem,” meaning collaboration and file storage system—is the official brand for the education deployment of IONOS Nextcloud Workspace. The underlying Nextcloud platform is German-made, open source and self-hosted. The education edition provides workspaces for administrators and students as part of Educational Cloud Infrastructure, or Pädagogische Cloud Infrastruktur (PCI).

Which states are joining the program?

The six participating federal states are:

• Berlin
• Bremen
• Hamburg
• Hesse
• North Rhine-Westphalia
• Rhineland-Palatinate

KoDaS forms the education component of PCI, a joint program to build shared infrastructure for educational applications. It offers an alternative to proprietary platforms, particularly those controlled from the United States.

Digital sovereignty, a concept that began in Europe and has gained global recognition, requires data originating in one country to remain there. It also seeks to reduce reliance on foreign-controlled hardware, software and infrastructure.

In plain terms: the six-state program turns digital sovereignty into a shared school operating model rather than six separate buying exercises.

What did IONOS win, and at what scale?

IONOS, a German web-hosting and cloud-infrastructure provider, announced the contract this week. The agreement covers platform setup, data migration and ongoing operation.

• Hosting: The complete KoDaS service will run exclusively in IONOS data centers in Germany, keeping school files and collaboration data inside the country.
• Cost basis: The four-year agreement bills according to active users across five tiers, rather than setting one capacity level for every district.
• Capacity: The smallest tier covers up to 50,000 users. The largest accommodates more than 500,000, over ten times the starting tier’s ceiling.
• Expansion: Districts can select a tier according to actual need and expand gradually. Additional German states can also join the program.

“With KoDaS, we’re establishing a common European foundation for digital collaboration in schools across six federal states,” said Achim Weiß, CEO of IONOS SE.

Weiß described the German-developed service as combining security, reliability and, above all, digital sovereignty, which he called indispensable in education.

In plain terms: IONOS has won the hosting and operating role for a platform that can scale from tens of thousands to more than half a million users.

How did the states procure the platform?

The procurement dates to at least December, when govdigital eG, a cooperative of German public-sector IT providers, issued the KoDaS tender on behalf of PCI and the six participating states.

The arrangement consolidates buying across state borders instead of requiring each education authority to negotiate separately. govdigital COO Jens Fromm said the joint procurement gives participating states a scalable solution that combines digital sovereignty with cost-effective purchasing.

In plain terms: one cooperative tender creates shared purchasing terms while leaving participation by individual districts voluntary.

What will schools actually use?

Participating administrators and students will receive a complete digital workspace covering three core functions:

• File storage
• Collaborative document editing
• Communication

For participating districts, KoDaS covers those collaboration needs without relying on services such as Dropbox, Microsoft, Google or Slack. Nextcloud has international adoption and also serves as a FOSS Force Platinum Sponsor.

In a Tuesday blog post, Nextcloud senior communications manager Kim Pohlmann argued that students who use only products from a few major technology companies may carry those defaults into professional life. Familiarity with proprietary products can make alternatives harder to introduce because organizations then face user-acceptance, training and change-management concerns.

“Schools should teach digital skills, not dependency on individual technology providers. If we want future generations to make independent decisions about technology, we need to familiarize them with open source technologies from an early age,” said Nextcloud co-founder and CEO Frank Karlitschek.

In plain terms: schools get standard collaboration functions without making a small group of proprietary vendors the default choice for students.

What changes beyond the first six states?

The contract allows more German states to join, turning a six-state deployment into a reusable public-sector procurement model. A comparable education-cloud initiative also exists in France.

Torsten Brandt, chair of the PCI steering committee and a representative of the Hessian Ministry of Culture, Education, and Opportunities, said the states would jointly create reliable conditions for secure and sovereign education infrastructure. He called KoDaS another building block that participating states could deploy easily and in line with their needs.

Takeaway: IONOS and Nextcloud now have the infrastructure and contract to build a German-hosted school cloud, but local adoption still depends on voluntary uptake, user acceptance and effective change management.