Federated Core Platform is a privacy-first, self-hosted alternative to the dominant cloud productivity suites and SaaS software (“Software as a Service”) — think Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Proton — but one where your organization actually owns and controls its data. Put bluntly, use those and you think you own the data, but you don’t. They do. Now think about what you do with those services.
Built on open-source foundations, Federated Core Platform bundles a full suite of business tools
- email,
- calendar,
- file storage,
- video conferencing,
- CRM,
- VPN,
- project management,
- and more
into a single, deployable stack that runs on your own infrastructure or any cloud you choose.
For enterprises wary of handing sensitive data to hyperscalers (i.e., massive cloud service providers with vast global data centers), it offers the functionality of modern SaaS without giving them surveillance.
What sets Federated Core apart is its privacy model.
Using Federated Core, organizations can interoperate with one another while keeping their data private within their own environments.
This makes Federated Core particularly compelling for industries with strict compliance requirements where data residency and auditability aren’t optional such as
- non-profits,
- healthcare,
- legal,
- finance,
- government,
- DIOCESES,
- PARISHES,
- RELIGIOUS ORDERS.
Instead of accepting a vendor’s opaque terms of service (i.e., the small print, and even the large print), teams get full administrative control, audit logs, and the ability to inspect the code their business runs on.
If you or your company is using SaaS, you are effectively renting your data to someone else (e.g., hyperscalers).
It’s simple: stop renting access to your own company’s data.
Federated Core Platform gives organizations the productivity stack they need without the lock-in, the data harvesting, or the escalating per-seat fees (i.e., the more people you have using the SaaS service, the more they charge you).
For IT and security leaders, it’s a rare chance to consolidate tools, reduce third-party risk, and put data governance back in-house, without asking employees to sacrifice the polished, integrated experience they expect from modern software.
Millions of people use the same applications offered by Federated Core Platform every day.
An ad?
I work in a fortune 500 business that does business in healthcare, military and industrial segments of the market. ANY TIME your data is not on a device the business owns/controls there is a privacy risk. The government/military uses M365 services and there really is no good/functional alternative. The government, especially the military side, requires the use of a platform that they have vetted and has proper controls in place to prevent data leaks.
In the consumer space, where the customer is a product, where people get services for FREE they should expect ZERO privacy. Encrypt your data before putting it on someone else’s device.
For customers who are paying $40-60/month for a platform with a signed NDA, these concerns are just part of doing business. Microsoft is making their money on the monthly fees. We spend around $10 million with MS for their platform and services yearly. It is the ONLY platform that we can use to work within all of our business segments.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that an open source platform would never work for us. When we acquire companies, one of the first things we do is migrate all of the data off these FOSS solutions and into our standard enterprise environment.
Some of the data that we don’t want in the cloud runs in our own datacenters. There is a cost analysis that is done for almost every workload. Some don’t just justify the costs of being on-prem. Anything that has an external attack surface goes into the cloud and we offload the security to the cloud service provider, at least for the DDOS, IPS and Filtering. Those are expensive in terms of software, hardware and man power to keep up to date.
For small business, etc. where low cost is the primary driver, then FOSS may be the best route.
For our small catholic, diocese independent, school we use the M365 platform. It is very cheap (a couple dollars per student/staff member). This pulls device management (a huge issue in a school) along with all of the standard platform services into one management plane. Students get access to the platform that will be most used in university/business. This allows students to graduate high school with a firm grasp of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Teams and the ancillary services that almost every business uses (Sharepoint, OneDrive, Etc.).
moon1234: While perhaps your Fortune 500 company needs O365 to manage all your sites, there is a cost to that convenience. You pay part of it in money and the other part in risk. The security flaws in Microsoft’s products, some of which lead to data breaches, come across my screen more than weekly.
I agree with you that whenever an organization gets something for (near) free, the people are the product and their data is probably not safe from harvesting. But then you point out how cheap it is for your “small catholic, diocese independent, school” to use the O365 platform.
I also hope that your students are being educated well enough that they could learn to work with any modern (even FOSS) word-processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation, and chat software and that knowledge will translate to other applications in the same genre. If not, then you are failing your students.
I disagree that low-cost is the only driver to not use something like O365. Wanting to be free from having ones data harvested and to be independent of a large corporation like Microsoft are others. Also greater security.
FOSS solutions are possible and they are more scalable than many people and many companies think. “No one gets fired for choosing Microsoft” is the current state for sure. However, that choice, like any other choice, consists of trade-offs.
In the department were I work, security is one of our primary concerns. As such, we do not put our data into “the cloud” (which is just someone else’s computer) and we minimize the Windows footprint because of the security concerns. Corporate-wide we still use Windows and tools like Excel, but that is a different department’s security concern. Even without Windows and those big-corporation Saas tools, we are very productive and our people are quite happy with their off-Domain workstations that don’t run Windows.
So it all depends. I haven’t used Federated Computer’s services, but I am glad they having success doing so. They are helping people see that they can be very productive and operate in their organization without tying themselves to large corporations like Microsoft, Oracle, etc.