Business applications securely from the Open Telekom Cloud

In this article you will read about

• how the software provider insinno scores points with its customers,
• why the Heidelberg-based company relies on the IT infrastructure from the Open Telekom Cloud for its business applications,
• and how the secure and stable resources from Telekom's data centers convince insinno's customers.

According to the German Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Association (VUL), more than 430,000 drones are currently flying in the skies over Germany. A large proportion of them are for private use. Other devices are used commercially – for logistics services, monitoring sensitive infrastructures, or filming and photography from the air, for example. But anyone who lets the unmanned aerial vehicles take to the skies must also always keep in mind the possible risks. And take out appropriate insurance in the event of an accident. Insurers offer special drone liability insurance for this purpose. HDI, for example, the liability association of German industry, also covers damage caused by drones and impresses with a particularly smart and easy service. This is because the German market leader in professional drone liability insurance was not only one of the first to offer such coverage. Right from the start, HDI has also made the entire application process available to its customers online – from selecting the offer and calculating the individual tariff to taking out the insurance policy with just a few clicks and within a few minutes.

This service is made possible due to the Heidelberg-based software company insinno and the Open Telekom Cloud. The young company from the state of Baden-Württemberg specializes in the development of business applications, from solution design to implementation and operation. In doing so, insinno provides tailored approaches, speed, and smooth processes in practice – in short: the entire service from a single source. The Open Telekom Cloud provides the secure IT infrastructure that all the solutions are based on. Thus, since 2018, insinno has been obtaining various cloud services such as the necessary servers, database services, and object-based storage from Telekom's data centers.

Another decisive advantage: The software company’s customers, including many such as HDI from the insurance sector and BASF from industry, are reliant on secure and certified providers, partly in order to meet the regulatory requirements of the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin). The latter imposes strict stipulations for the outsourcing of applications. "When we plan a solution together with customers, their data protection officers are always involved. We, insinno, are ISO 27001 certified, i.e., with regard to our information security management system. This is convincing in terms of our security mechanisms and also brings a decisive advantage in terms of speed." This is because the regulations for companies regarding IT security and data protection are usually not only strict, but also wide-ranging. "If the customer's IT department had to check all of these with us, it would involve a huge workload. The certificate, on the other hand, usually covers most of it," says Christian Michel. "When we bring the Open Telekom Cloud with its corresponding certificates into play as a hosting partner, then any doubts are usually eliminated."

For the customers, Telekom's offering stands for stability, reliability, trust, and security, as well as GDPR-compliant data storage in the EU. "Hyperscalers from America are out of the question for many of our customers from the outset, as government access to sensitive information cannot be ruled out there."  

In addition to the technical content design of the business applications and the issues surrounding data protection and security, insinno and the Open Telekom Cloud offer customers hosting and operation in both a separate and a shared environment. In the separate environment, users access their applications via dedicated servers. If users opt for shared services, insinno works with Docker containers for the deployment of the application.

insinno has also already planned further steps with the Open Telekom Cloud. Because: "We want to strengthen our continuity management," says Michel. In addition to the Cloud Backup and Recovery (CBR) service, which protects insinno and its customers against data loss, Michel and his team also want to use the Storage Disaster Recovery Service (SDRS) in the future, which keeps all data mirrored in another availability zone (AZ) of the Open Telekom Cloud. In the event of a failure, all data and services are immediately available again thanks to real-time synchronization between the AZs.