Nextcloud is being used by organizations, big and small, that value privacy, security, and control over their data. Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark GmbH is one such organization that’s using Nextcloud in certain capacities. We talked to Florian Hausleitner, Senior IT System Engineer of the center, to understand their IT infrastructure and the role Nextcloud plays at the center.
Please tell us about Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark and Raiffeisen Rechenzentrum? What does the center do?
Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark is 100% owned by Raiffeisen Landesbank Steiermark AG and privately funded.
Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark is a Full-Service IT-Provider in Financial Sector. We are providing the whole IT-Infrastructure as well as all financial applications for both Raiffeisen and Hypo Banks here in Styria/Austria. With over 4500 clients, more than 1500 Server-Systems, 1500 Network-Devices and two datacenters with 1400 m² housing space, Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark is one of the largest IT companies in the Southern Region of Austria.
Please tell us a bit about yourself and how you are associated with the center?
I am a Senior IT-Systems Engineer here at Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark. I am responsible for “Datacenter Service” which includes the complete stack from the datacenter buildings, power supply, air conditioning and the safety installations of the building.
As a Senior IT-Systems engineer, what are the things that keep you awake at night?
We want to deliver all of our services at a great level of availability, usability, and quality. For the datacenters themselves, it means I have to avoid downtime in any of our installations. I have to plan and provide capacities right and make sure that new systems are installed with no waiting time.
What kind of IT infrastructure are you running at the center?
We are running all kinds of managed services such as PaaS, IaaS based on VMWare, Storage on Demand based on Nextcloud, classic housing business, Network Services and Consulting Services.
How much of your IT infrastructure is Open Source or in-house?
Most of our infrastructure is in-house and is managed by ourselves. We do have Open-Source in our monitoring suite and some of our middleware.
What file storage demands and requirements does the center have? What kind of solutions are you using to address those needs?
Our main demands for storage are availability and scalability.
In addition to high availability and scalability, what are other factors that influence your decision to pick one solution over other? How important is security as well as access to source code when picking a solution?
The need for security in applications is definitely over the need to have access to the source code. There are other companies like Nextcloud which are way better in programming than us so we leave those things to them and at the same time, we assume that they are also doing the security correctly. I think related to security, we have also chosen the right product.
Are you using Nextcloud exclusively or using a mix of storage solutions?
We are using a mix of different solutions. Nextcloud is the one and only solution we are providing to our End-Customers. All other solutions and systems are SAN and NAS Systems which are used only internally to provide our services.
Why did you choose Nextcloud, what were the core reasons?
We chose Nextcloud because it had the most user-friendly (web) interface, met all our security requirements and is scalable. Also, you can easily extend features.
What features of NC do you use themost, as compared to other solutions?
The easy to use Web Interface.
How important was the fact that NC is also open source that influenced your decision? There are other solutions too, why did you choose NC?
The fact that it is Open Source was not necessarily important for us. It is more like an “Addon” – you always have the option to use something good out there.