Migrating from Google Workspace to Nextcloud Enterprise: The Infrastructure Planning Guide

Every year, more organizations reconsider their dependency on Google Workspace. The reasons vary, but the underlying concerns are converging: data privacy has become a board-level priority, per-user pricing has climbed steadily, and the limitations of a platform designed for consumer-scale convenience are increasingly visible at enterprise scale. For organizations that have decided to move, Nextcloud Enterprise has emerged as the most credible self-hosted alternative -- but migrating a collaboration platform used by hundreds of people daily is not a weekend project. It requires infrastructure planning that matches the ambition.

This guide covers the infrastructure decisions that determine whether your migration succeeds or stalls. We focus on sizing, data transfer, document editing integration, high availability, and the hosting architecture that supports all of it.

Why Organizations Are Leaving Google Workspace

The migration trend is not driven by a single issue. It is the accumulation of several concerns that, together, make the case for change.

Privacy and data sovereignty. Google's business model is built on data processing at scale. While Google Workspace agreements include data processing addendums, the underlying infrastructure is still subject to the US CLOUD Act, which grants US law enforcement the ability to compel disclosure of data stored by US-headquartered companies -- regardless of where the data physically resides. For European organizations operating under GDPR, or for any entity handling sensitive client data, this creates a legal and reputational exposure that no contract clause fully resolves.

Pricing unpredictability. Google Workspace pricing has increased multiple times since its rebranding from G Suite. The Business Standard plan, for example, has seen per-user cost increases that compound significantly for organizations with 200 or more seats. Worse, Google's storage pooling changes and the elimination of unlimited storage tiers have forced many organizations to purchase additional capacity at premium rates. When your collaboration platform costs are determined by a vendor's pricing decisions rather than your actual resource consumption, budgeting becomes guesswork.

Administrative control gaps. Google Workspace provides a polished user experience, but administrators frequently encounter limitations: restricted control over data retention policies, limited audit logging granularity, and an inability to customize the platform beyond what Google's admin console permits. For organizations with specific compliance requirements -- healthcare, legal, financial services -- these gaps become blockers.

The trend is particularly pronounced in Europe, where multiple national and regional governments have mandated or strongly encouraged the adoption of sovereign cloud alternatives. France's DINUM issued guidance favoring open-source collaboration tools for public administration. Germany's data protection authorities have repeatedly flagged Google Workspace as problematic under GDPR. These are not fringe positions -- they reflect a structural shift toward digital sovereignty that is reshaping enterprise IT procurement.

Sizing Your Nextcloud Infrastructure

The most common mistake in Nextcloud deployments is treating infrastructure sizing as a one-time decision. Organizations either over-provision (wasting budget on resources they will not use for months) or under-provision (creating performance problems that undermine user adoption during the critical post-migration period). The right approach is to size for your current needs and ensure your hosting platform supports independent scaling as those needs evolve.

Infrastructure Recommendations by Team Size

For 50 users, a single well-configured server handles Nextcloud, the database, and Redis comfortably. Four vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM provide enough headroom for concurrent file syncing, calendar operations, and light document editing. Storage requirements depend heavily on your use case -- a consultancy sharing mostly documents might need 200 GB, while a media company dealing with large files could need several times that.

For 200 users, the database should move to its own instance or at minimum receive dedicated resources. Concurrent file operations at this scale generate significant I/O, and a shared database competing with the application server for disk access creates latency that users notice immediately. Doubling the vCPU and RAM allocation to 8 vCPU / 16 GB accommodates the increased concurrent connections and background job processing.

For 500+ users, the architecture shifts to a multi-server deployment. The Nextcloud application servers should be load-balanced, the database should run in a clustered configuration for both performance and redundancy, and the document editing layer (Collabora or ONLYOFFICE) needs its own dedicated compute resources. At this scale, dedicated infrastructure or a private cloud is the appropriate hosting model.

The critical advantage of hosting on MassiveGRID is that these resources scale independently. If your 200-user deployment needs more CPU for processing but storage consumption is growing slowly, you increase vCPU allocation without touching RAM or disk. This eliminates the forced upgrade tiers that most hosting platforms impose, where getting more CPU means paying for RAM and storage you do not need yet.

Data Migration Workflow

Migrating data from Google Workspace to Nextcloud involves three distinct streams: file storage, calendars and contacts, and optionally email. Each has its own tooling and considerations.

Files: Google Takeout and rclone

Google Takeout provides bulk export of all data associated with a Google account, including Drive files, Docs (exported as .docx or .odt), Sheets, and Slides. For organizations with fewer than 50 users, Takeout exports followed by manual upload to Nextcloud can work. For larger organizations, this approach does not scale.

rclone is the standard tool for automated Google Drive to Nextcloud transfers. It supports both Google Drive and Nextcloud as backends, handles incremental sync, preserves directory structures, and can run multiple parallel transfers to maximize throughput. A typical rclone configuration for this migration looks like:

rclone sync google-drive: nextcloud-webdav:/migration/ \
  --transfers 8 \
  --checkers 16 \
  --drive-acknowledge-abuse \
  --verbose

For organizations with terabytes of data, the initial transfer can take days. This is where your hosting provider's bandwidth policy matters. MassiveGRID's bandwidth allocations -- starting at 4 TB of transfer on entry-level plans and scaling to 32 TB on enterprise configurations -- accommodate large initial data migrations without throttling or overage charges. The transfer runs at full speed from the first byte to the last.

Nextcloud also provides its own migration tools for administrators. The occ files:scan command indexes migrated files after transfer, and the occ files:transfer-ownership command reassigns file ownership between users -- essential when migrating shared drives from Google's organizational structure to Nextcloud's folder sharing model.

Calendars and Contacts: CalDAV and CardDAV

Google Calendar and Google Contacts can be exported in standard formats (ICS for calendars, VCF for contacts) and imported directly into Nextcloud's built-in Calendar and Contacts apps. For ongoing synchronization during a phased migration, CalDAV and CardDAV protocols allow bidirectional sync between Google and Nextcloud, so users can transition gradually rather than being forced to switch everything on a single cutover date.

For organizations using shared calendars extensively, plan to recreate the sharing structure within Nextcloud after import. Nextcloud's calendar sharing supports user-level, group-level, and link-based access -- mapping cleanly to most Google Calendar sharing configurations.

Email Migration

If your migration includes moving away from Gmail to Nextcloud's Groupware email integration (or a standalone mail server like Mailcow or Mail-in-a-Box), tools like imapsync handle the transfer. imapsync connects to both the source (Gmail via IMAP) and the destination mail server, transferring all messages, folders, and flags. This process is bandwidth-intensive but straightforward.

Email migration is often the most sensitive part of the transition. Consider running both systems in parallel for 30 to 60 days, with mail forwarding from Gmail to the new system, to ensure nothing is lost and users have time to update their workflows.

Replacing Google Docs: Collabora Online vs. ONLYOFFICE

File storage and sync are only half of what Google Workspace provides. The other half is real-time collaborative document editing -- and this is where the infrastructure decisions become most consequential.

Nextcloud integrates with two primary document editing backends: Collabora Online and ONLYOFFICE. Both provide browser-based editing of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Both support real-time collaboration with multiple simultaneous editors. But their architectures and resource requirements differ significantly.

Collabora Online

Collabora Online is based on LibreOffice technology and is the officially recommended document editing solution for Nextcloud Enterprise. It renders documents server-side, which means the server performs the document conversion and rendering work, and the browser displays the result. This architecture provides excellent format fidelity -- especially for complex .docx and .xlsx files -- but it is CPU-intensive.

For a 50-user deployment, allocate at least 2 additional vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM for the Collabora container. For 200 users with frequent concurrent editing sessions, plan for 4 vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM dedicated to Collabora. At 500+ users, Collabora should run on its own dedicated server or as a horizontally scaled cluster.

With MassiveGRID's independent resource scaling, you can allocate extra CPU specifically for Collabora's processing demands without over-provisioning RAM or storage on the primary Nextcloud server. If your team's document editing activity spikes -- quarterly reporting periods, for example -- you scale CPU for the Collabora instance temporarily and scale it back when the peak passes.

ONLYOFFICE

ONLYOFFICE takes a different approach: it performs more rendering work in the browser, which reduces server-side CPU load but shifts some processing to the end user's device. This makes ONLYOFFICE somewhat lighter on server resources -- a typical deployment needs roughly 30% less CPU than an equivalent Collabora setup. However, users on older or lower-powered devices may notice sluggishness during complex editing sessions.

ONLYOFFICE also offers stronger native compatibility with Microsoft Office formats, which can be a deciding factor for organizations that exchange documents heavily with external partners still using Microsoft 365.

Which to Choose

Choose Collabora if document format fidelity is critical, if your users work with complex formatted documents, or if you want the officially supported Nextcloud integration path. Choose ONLYOFFICE if Microsoft Office compatibility is paramount, if you want to minimize server-side resource requirements, or if your users generally work on modern devices with adequate processing power.

Either way, the document editing layer is the most resource-variable component of a Nextcloud deployment. It is the primary reason why independent resource scaling -- rather than fixed-tier hosting plans -- matters for this use case.

Ensuring Zero Downtime During and After Migration

The irony of migrating away from Google Workspace for reliability and control reasons -- only to deploy on infrastructure that introduces new downtime risks -- is lost on no one. Your team is learning new workflows, adjusting to a new interface, and rebuilding muscle memory around daily collaboration tasks. If the platform goes down during this critical adoption phase, confidence collapses and the migration effort is set back by weeks.

This is why the hosting architecture behind your Nextcloud deployment matters as much as the Nextcloud configuration itself.

MassiveGRID's High Availability architecture provides automatic failover at the infrastructure level. Your Nextcloud instance runs on a Proxmox HA cluster with Ceph distributed storage. If a physical node fails -- hardware malfunction, power issue, any unplanned outage -- the virtual machine is automatically restarted on a healthy node within the cluster. Your data, distributed across multiple drives and multiple servers via Ceph, remains intact and accessible throughout the failover process.

This is not a premium add-on or an enterprise-only feature. It is the standard architecture for every server deployed on MassiveGRID's platform. From day one of your Nextcloud deployment, your collaboration platform has the same level of infrastructure protection that Google provides for Workspace -- without the privacy trade-offs that prompted the migration in the first place.

For the migration itself, the recommended approach is to run both systems in parallel during the transition period:

1. Deploy and configure Nextcloud on MassiveGRID infrastructure, including the document editing layer and all integrations.
2. Migrate data in the background using rclone, running incremental syncs to keep the Nextcloud instance up to date while users continue working in Google Workspace.
3. Conduct a pilot phase with a small group of users (10-20% of the organization) who work in Nextcloud while the rest remain on Google Workspace.
4. Cutover the remaining users in planned batches, department by department, with a final incremental sync before each batch to capture last-minute changes.
5. Maintain read-only access to Google Workspace for 30-60 days post-migration as a safety net.

This phased approach eliminates the single-point-of-failure risk inherent in big-bang migrations and gives your team time to adapt without pressure.

The Privacy Advantage of Single-Tenant Hosting

Organizations that migrate away from Google Workspace for privacy reasons need to think carefully about where their data lands next. Moving from a hyperscaler's multi-tenant environment to another multi-tenant hosting platform -- where your VPS shares physical hardware with unknown other tenants, and where a hypervisor vulnerability could theoretically expose your data -- undermines the privacy gains that motivated the migration.

MassiveGRID provides single-tenant hosting and private cloud options specifically designed for organizations with strict data isolation requirements. On a dedicated cloud server or private cloud deployment, your Nextcloud instance runs on infrastructure that is exclusively yours. No resource sharing with other customers. No noisy neighbor effects degrading performance during peak hours. No shared attack surface.

Combined with MassiveGRID's global datacenter presence -- New York, London, Frankfurt, and Singapore -- organizations control exactly where their data physically resides. A German law firm can deploy in Frankfurt and guarantee that client data never leaves EU jurisdiction. A Singaporean financial services firm can host in Singapore to meet MAS regulatory requirements. The datacenter choice is yours, and the data stays where you put it.

This combination of single-tenant isolation and geographic control is what transforms a Google Workspace migration from a simple platform swap into a genuine improvement in data governance. You are not just replacing one vendor's cloud with another. You are taking control of the infrastructure layer in a way that was never possible with Google Workspace.

Post-Migration: Ongoing Support and Optimization

The migration itself is a project with a defined end date. What follows is ongoing operations -- and this is where many self-hosted deployments struggle. Nextcloud releases major updates every few months, PHP versions need to be kept current, database performance requires periodic tuning, and storage growth needs to be monitored and addressed before it becomes a problem.

MassiveGRID's 24/7 direct human support means post-migration optimization is handled by engineers who understand both the infrastructure stack (Proxmox, Ceph, Linux) and Nextcloud's specific requirements (PHP-FPM tuning, Redis caching configuration, Collabora resource allocation). When you open a support ticket about slow file sync performance, the response comes from someone who can trace the issue from the Nextcloud application layer down through the PHP worker configuration, the database query performance, and the underlying storage I/O -- not a chatbot asking you to clear your browser cache.

This level of support is particularly valuable during the first 90 days after migration, when usage patterns are still emerging and the initial infrastructure sizing may need adjustment. If your team adopts Collabora more heavily than anticipated and concurrent editing sessions are consuming more CPU than planned, MassiveGRID's support team can identify the bottleneck and scale the appropriate resource -- without requiring you to migrate to a larger fixed-tier plan.

The bottom line: Migrating from Google Workspace to Nextcloud is an infrastructure decision as much as it is a software decision. The hosting platform you choose determines whether your team gains genuine independence and control, or simply trades one set of limitations for another. MassiveGRID's combination of independent resource scaling, built-in high availability, single-tenant hosting options, and Nextcloud-expert support makes it the infrastructure foundation that a serious migration deserves.

Ready to start planning your Google Workspace migration? Explore MassiveGRID's Nextcloud hosting and talk to an engineer about sizing your deployment for your team's specific needs.