Out-Law News 1 min. read

Deutsche Telekom to offer new cloud services from 'highly secure data centres in Germany'


German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom is to offer new cloud computing services to businesses from "highly secure data centres in Germany" beginning this month, the company has announced.

Deutsche Telekom's public cloud solutions will be operated and managed by T-Systems, a division of its company, and be built on Cisco's "cloud platform". The cloud services will comply with Germany's data protection laws, it said.

"Starting in December, companies of all sizes will be able to order IT services such as computing, storage and networking in a pay-as-you-go model through Telekom’s new cloud portal," Deutsche Telekom said in a statement. "Through this offering, Telekom creates the foundation for a secure European internet of things that offers the highest availability and scalability for real-time analytics."

Reinhard Clemens, chief executive of T-Systems, said that data held on Deutsche Telekom's cloud infrastructure would be "100% out of the reach of the US authorities", according to a report by the Financial Times.

“We’ve worked on this for two years and it’s clear that the US government has no chance of forcing us in Germany to deliver data to the US,” Clemens said, according to the report.

Last month it was announced that Deutsche Telekom, through T-Systems, would act as a "data trustee" for Microsoft to allow the US technology giant to offer cloud computing services in Germany without the company itself having access to the data of its customers.

Concerns about the surveillance capabilities of US authorities have been outlined in recent times after the whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed details of practices deployed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013.

In October, the EU's highest court ruled that a framework designed to facilitate transfers of personal data between the EU and US in a way that adheres to EU data protection standards was "invalid" after concerns were raised about communications surveillance in the US and the extent of privacy safeguards the US has in place.

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