The best clouds on the German market

In this article you can read

• which public clouds are classified as leaders in the German market,
• what strengths independent analysts see in the Open Telekom Cloud, and
• how you can obtain the complete report.

Even though the cloud market in Germany has largely been consolidated, it still offers a wealth of choice – even beyond the established hyperscalers. ISG has therefore once again taken a close look at the cloud provider market as part of its ISG Provider Lens™ - Multi Public Cloud Services 2023. 20 providers made it into the competitive comparison. Five of them – including the Open Telekom Cloud – were classified as market leaders.

As expected, the analysts listed AWS and Azure as the leading cloud platforms in the German market. Google Cloud, the third hyperscaler, the Open Telekom Cloud and IONOS form a trio of followers in the leader quadrant.

For providers to be considered for the benchmark, they must provide highly scalable services in a genuine public cloud model. It must be possible for users to obtain the services web-based and as required. The portfolio of provided services must include at least computing, storage and network services (IaaS). Some providers differentiate themselves with additional PaaS services such as containers and databases, analysis tools and machine learning through to "serverless" services.

The Open Telekom Cloud has made it onto the list of the best clouds in the German market for the fifth time in a row, successively ranking as a leader since 2019. In 2023, ISG summarizes: "T-Systems is continuously expanding the services on its innovative public cloud platform, the Open Telekom Cloud, for the European market".  In addition to this general recognition of continuous development and the European focus, the analysts identified three key strengths of the Open Telekom Cloud:

• Security
• Hybrid options
• Sustainability

For the analysts, the Open Telekom Cloud initially scores with a purely European concept: "With the Open Telekom Cloud ... T-Systems offers business customers a secure European public cloud environment". Not only the data storage in highly available data centers in Germany and the Netherlands, but also the OpenStack basis provide the cloud platform with a high level of trustworthiness with specific outcomes for corporate customers: "Legal problems such as those that can arise in the course of the US CLOUD Act are avoided". The bottom line is that the Open Telekom Cloud is an "alternative to hyperscalers".

At the same time, the Open Telekom Cloud sees itself as part of its customers' multi-cloud mix. With its hybrid options, it allows "mixed" data processing: critical data can be processed in the Open Telekom Cloud, non-critical at the customer's discretion with a US hyperscaler. With Cloud Create, it offers a way to implement such multi-cloud concepts.

The third outstanding feature of the Open Telekom Cloud is its unconditional focus on sustainability: 
"T-Systems pursues a strict sustainability strategy that is constantly being improved in order to continuously reduce CO₂ emissions". For the Open Telekom Cloud, sustainability is a design criterion that is decisive for further development. The team is therefore continuously working on making the provision of cloud resources for customers as efficient and low-energy as possible. 

As part of the Lens, ISG also examined the aspect of cloud sovereignty in a separate report – albeit at European level. Here, too, T-Systems was able to position itself as a leader with its portfolio, including the Open Telekom Cloud.