Who are we?

DEUTSCHE WOLKE is an initiative for the development of a federal Cloud-Infrastructure in Germany. This open-source initiative was established by a network of well-known German as well as international organizations. The participating partners are leaders in their respective fields of business: they have positioned themselves as cutting-edge innovators and enjoy high reputation among their clients.

You may find more information about the individual project partners here.

What do we do?

Within a few years, cloud computing has quickly emerged as an attractive alternative to the conventional IT-infrastructure. Better Internet connectivity, higher bandwidths and substantially cheaper investment and maintenance costs all attribute to this attractiveness.

At the BITKOM 2010, Mr. René Obermann (CEO of Deutsche Telekom) explicitly endorsed a “Cloud Made in Germany” and had advocated open interfaces and standards ever since. However, although Germany's strict rules with respect to data security are regarded as a competitive  advantage , general discussions now tends to argue for a global leveling of data security policies. Nevertheless, unless such a leveling will not be based on data security standards and procedures as currently applicable to Germany, this competitive advantage will eventually diminish.

The DEUTSCHE WOLKE-initiative works towards realizing the vision of  a “Cloud Made in Germany”: open standards, maximum performance and availability  - and first and foremost based on the strict and currently valid data security policies.

What do we want (seek)?

Due to the virtualization of server farms i.e. the grouping and redistribution of available IT resources irrespective of their location, it has become impossible for cloud producers to find out on which server and in which country the cloud-migrated data is being used. a circumstance, which is problematic when analyzed from different angles.
On the one hand, it leads to consumer uncertainty, regarding the destination and agreed assignability of saved data and in the case of a change in supplier, or in case of a hardware malfunction, it remains uncertain to the consumer whether all information from the cloud was extracted successfully, or if eventually disrupted or lost data can be fully recovered.
On the other hand, the accessibility of stored data by third parties and the extent to which Governments outside Germany (e.g. EU) are allowed to use this data also remains uncertain. From the data protection pint of view, this situation remains rather problematic, as the transportation and storage of sensitive company data, its legal protection as well as its proper use, cannot be fully controlled.

Made in Germany” is what differentiates DEUTSCHE WOLKE – Cloud Infrastructure from alternative solutions. The market is currently dominated by solutions from abroad, where stored data does not underlie very strong regulations regarding data security and the obligations to observe confidentiality, as it is the case in Germany. Also, memory location (server and hard drive) - of migrated customer data is not clearly verifiable.

The concept of the DEUTSCHE WOLKE is geared towards meeting the demand of Organizations resident in Germany: it develops solutions tailored to the needs of the existing market gaps of Cloud-Computing for these organizations. The following objectives were targeted during the development works of “Cloud Made in Germany”:

• Safety

  • Server and data are located exclusively in Germany and underlie the country’s strong data security regulations.
  • Cloud data is protected from access by third parties as well as their ability to further process this data.

• Transparency

  • Unique assignability of data in the cloud: If necessary, data can be entirely extracted from or permanently deleted from the cloud. The path of data with the cloud can always be traced.

• Reliability

  • The main focus will be a high-performing Cloud-Infrastructure which responds dynamically to changing customer-needs.