The festival of the digital future: Digital X in Cologne 

In this article you will read about,

• what Digital X in Cologne has to offer on September 13 and 14,
• which premiere and what else you can expect at the Open Telekom Cloud House,
• which digitalization projects customers have already carried out with the Open Telekom Cloud.

The digital world of tomorrow – without gazing into a crystal ball, but with exciting digitalization projects at numerous locations throughout the city: This is what Digital X will be offering on September 13 and 14 in Cologne. An opportunity to talk shop, exchange ideas, and network in a festival atmosphere. Inspiration to develop new ideas and explore new digital paths. For start-ups and big companies, for experts as well as for anyone who is curious and interested.

Peter, the whole of Cologne will be in a digital state of excitement in mid-September. What can visitors expect at the Open Telekom Cloud House, and what innovations do you have up your sleeve?

Plenty – for example, visitors can find out all about our solutions and customer projects. Our cloud and IT experts will also be on hand to answer any questions. But you're probably hinting at something else: We've prepared a premiere. After successfully running our Magenta Cloud consumer offering on the Open Telekom Cloud, we now want to expand it for business customers. We are presenting the new Magenta Cloud Business offering for the first time at Digital X. It offers a uniquely secure, GDPR-compliant solution hosted in Germany to store, synchronize, and share data. And this much I can already reveal: First-time visitors can register for a free preview version of the Magenta Cloud Business.  

That sounds exciting – what are the industries that Magenta Cloud Business is particularly well suited to?

The Open Telekom Cloud focuses on the public sector, healthcare, insurance, and financial service providers. But the Magenta Cloud Business offering is not industry-specific. It is suitable for all companies that operate data-sensitive business models. To give visitors a better idea of the areas of application, we have brought along various customer references from the Open Telekom Cloud. I would like to briefly introduce three here – because all of them place particular emphasis on highly secure and GDPR-compliant data processing and are subject to strict compliance regulations.   

With our help, the Chamber of Industry and Commerce for Upper Bavaria has bid farewell to its on-premises infrastructure and now relies completely on the Open Telekom Cloud for the operation of all its websites, services, and online platforms. As a public corporation with public service statutory tasks in education and training, in addition to the GDPR, the Chamber of Industry and Commerce is also bound by professional secrecy. Therefore, for example, a provider with servers outside the European Union and with rigid terms and conditions was out of the question.

Strict compliance guidelines and the regulations of the German financial regulator, Bafin, play a major role for our customer ROLAND Rechtsschutz. With our multi-certified public cloud services, we have already been able to meet a large part of the regulatory requirements for security, data protection, and compliance and have only had to deal with a few additional requirements. ROLAND now runs its core applications, including important licensed databases, in the Open Telekom Cloud’s highly-secure data center. The company thus achieves better application performance, which benefits both employees and customers, greater flexibility – for example during peak loads – and lower costs thanks to the pay-as-you-go model.

For the HR service provider Randstad, it is also important to protect the heart of its digital applications: the MyRandstad portal, where a lot of sensitive personal data is stored. After the end of the Privacy Shield agreement between the EU and the United States, a US hyperscaler was no longer an option. With the Open Telekom Cloud, Randstad can now ensure that all its data remains in Germany. They also use an OpenStack-based infrastructure that can be flexibly developed and scaled – and is thus in no way inferior to the large US hyperscalers.

That's a whole range of business-critical requirements that you have addressed with the Open Telekom Cloud. If you had to name the five most powerful arguments in favor of the Open Telekom Cloud, what would they be?

If five are enough ... Let's start with data security and data protection: With the Open Telekom Cloud, all our customers' data remains in the EU or, if desired, in Germany. Numerous independent tests and certifications show that the Open Telekom Cloud meets the highest standards – whether it's the physical security of our geo-redundant data centers in Germany and the Netherlands or strict compliance with data security in accordance with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). What's more, our data centers stand for maximum reliability and 99.999 percent availability. They are also sustainable: 100 percent of their power requirements are covered by renewable energies.

Then there is the cloud architecture: It is based on the open-source solution OpenStack, which a dedicated community is constantly developing. Each new release undergoes a rigorous review to rule out bugs and security gaps. With OpenStack, users are not tied to a single provider and enjoy transparency, security, and flexibility. This is because OpenStack's open standard allows companies to integrate their IT projects and infrastructures into the Open Telekom Cloud as easily as possible.

Not getting stuck with any dependencies and always retaining comprehensive control – that is the principle of the sovereign cloud that we follow with the Open Telekom Cloud. It includes data and software sovereignty as well as operational and business sovereignty. This ensures that the cloud platform remains fully capable, is future-proofed, and protected against unauthorized access. 

Customers also benefit from the rapid provision of virtually unlimited storage, network, and computing resources. For example, to cushion peak loads. With our ModelArts suite, they can also avail of a development service for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. All capacities can be booked and unbooked within a few minutes and used as needed in a pay-as-you-go model. Of course, we also provide customers with resources for fixed booking over various terms in the "Reserved" model.

Last but not least, highly qualified consultants are on hand to support customers at all times. And visitors can meet some of them in person at the Open Telekom Cloud House.

Thank you very much for talking to us, Peter! And have fun at Digital X.