Blog · Sovereignty
Nextcloud
a local cloud that keeps data sovereignty
Six questions to ask before trusting your files, and what a self-operated cloud really changes.
Sovereignty is not a slogan, it is a list of questions
"Your data stays with you" means nothing until you have answered six specific questions. Here are the ones we ask a provider, and the ones we must answer ourselves when entrusted with a cloud.
- 1Where is the disk, physically? A country, a building, a room. Not "in Europe": an address. Our Nextcloud instance runs on our servers, in the SXM IX data center in St Martin.
- 2Who holds the encryption key? If it is the vendor and not you, they can read your files. With us, encryption at rest is managed by the infrastructure we operate, and end-to-end encryption remains available client-side for what should never transit in clear.
- 3What happens if the provider shuts down? Export format, delay, cost. Data you cannot take back is not truly yours.
- 4Who can access it, and how do we prove it? Audit log enabled, named accounts, no shared accounts.
- 5Where are the backups? On different media, in a different location, and a tested restoration, not assumed.
- 6Who updates, and how fast? The day a vulnerability is disclosed in PHP or in an application, the question is not "is it up to date" but "how quickly".
What we operate, concretely
Our instance runs on Nextcloud 33.0.7, with PHP 8.4.27 and a MySQL database, on a volume of nearly 500 GB. These are not details: PHP 8.4.27 is precisely the version that fixes the two critical vulnerabilities of October 21, and the fact that it went into production with us the next day is the only argument that counts on this subject.
| Building block | What it brings |
|---|---|
| Files and shares | Per-client tree, expiring links, passwords, quotas, WebDAV access lets you mount a drive without a heavy client |
| Audit log | The admin_audit app records who touched what: essential as soon as there are multiple accounts |
| Groups and permissions | One folder per client, only one person sees it; nothing is "shared with everyone" by default |
| Server-side encryption | Files at rest are unreadable on disk, even from a stolen backup |
What a local cloud really changes
Three measurable effects, which have nothing to do with ideology:
- Latency a transfer that stays on the island does not depend on the submarine cable. On a multi-gigabyte folder, the difference shows in seconds.
- Outage when the international link goes down, internal sharing keeps working. A service hosted in Frankfurt, no.
- The bill no per-gigabyte exit cost, no per-user license that climbs with every hire.
And what it costs, which must also be said: someone must watch over updates, backups and monitoring. A poorly maintained local cloud is less secure than a well-maintained managed service, sovereignty is not a security guarantee, it is a condition of control.
The only test that matters
Restore a file deleted three weeks ago, without warning anyone, in less than an hour. If this test fails, the rest of this article is literature.
A similar project? We answer technical questions in a meeting, with the same figures as in these articles.
The matching service: hosting, backup and the local data center.