T-Systems and Google Partner to Deliver Sovereign Cloud for Germany

T-Systems and Google Cloud  will build and deliver sovereign cloud services for German enterprises, the public sector, and healthcare organizations. The companies will jointly innovate to develop a large spectrum of next-generation sovereign cloud solutions and infrastructure. These will allow customers to host their sensitive workloads on a sovereign cloud, whilst continuing to leverage the scalability, elasticity and reliability of public cloud services. Service management and operation of the sovereign cloud will be supervised by T-Systems.

"Our joint strategic goal is to support the digitalization of European companies and the public sector as they move operations to the cloud," explained Adel Al-Saleh, member of the Telekom Board of Management and CEO of T-Systems. "Together with Google Cloud, we will build a sovereign cloud services portfolio that provides clients with full control over their data, software and operations whilst leveraging the full power of Google Cloud. Even stricter compliance requirements for public sector institutions will be addressed. We are happy that we’ll be able to offer customers a cloud solution that is secure and sovereign, but also gives access to the innovation and scalability of Google Cloud in Germany. We are also considering Austria and Switzerland as a next step," he added.

For future growth, customers need access to the innovative capabilities and scalability of the public cloud. Also, they don’t want to risk lock-in to a particular vendor and keep full control over their data. "We’re committed to helping enable Germany’s digital transformation,“ said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. “Data privacy, security and control are vital to European and German organizations as they digitize their operations. The sovereign cloud solution we are partnering with T-Systems to create will provide public and private-sector organizations with an additional layer of technical and operational measures and controls that ensure German customers can meet their data, operational, and software sovereignty requirements.

In this new joint offering, that will be available as of mid 2022 and then upgraded over the following months, T-Systems will manage a set of sovereignty controls and measures, including encryption and identity management. In addition, T-Systems will exercise a control function over relevant parts of the German Google Cloud infrastructure. Any physical or virtual access to facilities in Germany will be under the supervision of T-Systems and Google Cloud.