Sharing is Caring

Autonomous Growth

The children daycare has an important role for many households. The work of a daycare has gotten broader over the years, extending services to include pedagogical advice and insights, and per-child personal development assistance.

The Situation

This children daycare started in 2005, and at the time taking care of 4 children at the same time. Over the next 19 years it grew steadily into a company with over 18 employees and interns, and offered specialized per-child-care.

In the beginning a single notebook was all what was needed to get administration done. As the organisation grew, the need between co-workers to share reports, evaluations and such between co-workers (and clients) became more urgent over time. At first, free cloud services where utilized to share a viarity of data between employees. As more data was needed to be accessed by more employees, the limitations, lack of privacy and ownership of it’s data became a growing concern and limiting factor.

The Usecase

Data on children is (together with six other categories) rated as most sensitive in the Netherlands. Protection of this data against unauthorized access is a big concern. Since employees and interns with different roles using different devices will be accessing this data, proper usermanagement and file-access-controls are required. Many free cloud storage solutions index and sell (analytics on) the data stored on it (which is not allowed by law), while many privacy-friendly cloud solutions offer products not matching the needs of this daycare.

So for this case we’re looking for a solution which score high on the following topics:

Ownership: The daycare should always remain owner of the data. The cloud storage solution cannot not access or use the data for their analytics.

Strong access control: Data needs to be accessible for office and remote workers alike. Also should the solution utilize multi factor authentication. To further restrict access, the solution can make use of an Access Control List (firewalled access). The solution should also provide fine grained access to data for authenticated users.

Scalability: The storage solution’s capacity should grow and shrink according the business’ needs.

The solution

For this children daycare many existing privacy respecting cloud solutions offer too much storage capacity for what this daycare needs. These mostly charge on a per-user fee. Keeping the pool of interns in mind, this could become costly very quickly.

WorkGroup Storage

Looking at the gap between available options and the business’ needs, we decided to build an selfhosted solution. This way we could make sure all the requirements where met. To provide for the needed scalability and continuity we descided to utilize amazons’ cloud technology (aws) as a hardware infrastructure layer. The software for maintaining all the data and access to it, Owncloud was the best choice. This software would enable employees and interns to access data securely across devices as laptops and mobile phones. As a bonus, the monthly costs of this solution are lower then most of the privacy respecting cloud solutions available.

Contact [email protected]  for detailed information and options.