Deutsche Telekom beefs up public cloud resilience with Amsterdam site

Public cloud is in the same league as water and energy supply in terms of its importance, according to Germany, so DT has just opened two new data centres in Amsterdam.

The new Open Telekom facilities, which have been operating in beta mode since March, mirror the telco’s existing sites in Biere and Magdeburg, Germany, which opened three years ago. The 500 km separating these two locations means that if one is knocked offline by a power outage or natural disaster, one or more of the others should still be up and running.

Deutsche Telekom’s new data centres measure in at a combined 21,000 square metres, and are powered exclusively by renewable energy sources. The operator says they meet all the latest regulations regarding GDPR and data protection, so with that in mind, it hopes to attract business customers that want to tap the benefits that come with cloud services, but need to adhere to stringent compliance and security requirements.

Deutsche Telekom also wants to sign up research institutions that are on the lookout for super-computing resources.

“To mark the launch of the Amsterdam data centre, research institutions are now being offered attractive terms for new customer contracts. These also include a free initial consultation and special support,” Deutsche Telekom explained. “With the opening offers, scientists now have the chance to obtain particularly favourable high-performance resources that are specifically tailored to the needs of science and research.”

The opening of Deutsche Telekom’s new data centre in Amsterdam falls under T-Systems’ Cloud First strategy. Announced in February, it has seen the company deepen its partnerships with hyperscalers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. The strategy also includes training 5,000 existing staff as cloud experts, adding to the 3,000 it already has. In all, T-Systems said its Cloud First investment will top three-digit million euros.

If all goes according to plan, the strategy should put Deutsche Telekom in a strong position to capitalise on the growing appetite for public cloud services.

Gartner predicted in April that global end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 23.1 percent this year to reach $332.3 billion, up from $270 billion last year. In 2022, that figure is expected to increase to nearly $400 billion.

The research firm says the pandemic served as a multiplier for CIOs’ interest in the cloud, encouraging them to overcome their reluctance to shifting mission-critical workloads off-premises.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is forecast to account for the bulk of the spending this year: $122.6 billion, to be precise. This is followed by infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), where spending is expected to come in at $82 billion.

“Everything is becoming cloud,” said Adel Al-Saleh, member of the Deutsche Telekom Board of Management and CEO of T-Systems, back in February. “The trick is no longer to operate data centres, but to map work processes intelligently in highly automated infrastructures, which we call cloud computing. We are consistently aligning our company to this.”