T-Systems and Google Cloud Partnering on Sovereign Cloud for Germany

SUNNYVALE, Calif. and FRANKFURT, Germany — T-Systems and Google Cloud are building and delivering sovereign cloud services for organizations in Germany. 

T-Systems and Google Cloud will jointly innovate to develop a “large spectrum of next-generation sovereign cloud solutions and infrastructure,” focusing on enterprises, the public sector and health care organizations in Germany, according to the companies last month. 

The joint offering will be available as of mid 2022 and upgraded over the following months.

Customers will be able to host their sensitive workloads on the sovereign cloud, while continuing to leverage the scalability and reliability of public cloud services for future growth. 

The public cloud access will ensure they “don’t risk lock-in to a particular vendor and keep full control over their data.”

T-Systems will supervise service management and operation of the sovereign cloud. The company will manage a set of sovereignty controls and measures, including encryption and identity management, as well as “exercise a control function over relevant parts of the German Google Cloud infrastructure.” Physical or virtual access to facilities in Germany, such as for routine maintenance and upgrades, will be under the supervision of both T-Systems and Google Cloud.  

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The partners expect the sovereign cloud offering will help clients in several ways:

• A full spectrum of innovative and scalable cloud technology at various levels of sovereignty
• Google Cloud’s open source expertise that provides freedom of choice and prevents lock-in
• Increased openness and transparency for clients
• Integration with existing IT landscapes 
• Help complying with existing European sovereign cloud policies, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• Full public cloud scale and version and feature parity to global network

Co-innovation center in Munich

Clients will be able to experience the sovereign cloud capabilities and collaborate with Google Cloud and T-Systems engineers on their technology challenges in a new training facility in Munich.

As the partnership features a commitment to co-innovation, dedicated teams of engineers from both companies will collaborate on open source technologies and solutions that meet the efficiency, data security, and technical sovereignty needs of customers, including data sovereignty, operational sovereignty and software sovereignty. 

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T-Systems and Google Cloud will share their knowledge and developing skills in Europe via training and workshops to help partners and customers to leverage the value of sovereign cloud solutions.

“We’re committed to helping enable Germany’s digital transformation,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. 

“Data privacy, security, and control are vital to European and German organizations as they digitize their operations.”

The sovereign cloud solution will provide an “additional layer of technical and operational measures and controls that ensure German customers can meet their data, operational, and software sovereignty requirements,” Kurian said. 

The joint strategic goal of the companies is to “support the digitalization of European companies and the public sector as they move operations to the cloud,” said Adel Al-Saleh, CEO, T-Systems.

“Even stricter compliance requirements for public sector institutions will be addressed,” Al-Saleh said.

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