Clouds moving into East Westphalia

Clouds, as they are known, are a practical data storage location, being device agnostic and available anywhere. For businesses, there are some regulations to be followed. Arvato Systems is currently expanding its cloud services portfolio by building a secure, powerful variant in Gütersloh. The Microsoft Azure Stack solution, going live this July, is one of just ten similar systems in the whole of Germany.

Public clouds offer many services and solutions for open cloud applications and these could be used by businesses, if governance and compliance regulations did not have to be considered. With a ‘private cloud’ however – which previously could not offer the same possibilities –  this is now all much easier. The problem has been solved using powerful, intelligent hybrid cloud technology, such as the Azure Stack which Arvato Systems is now building. “With this, our customers are able to benefit from the innovative Azure platform services, while their data is stored securely in our data centers”, explains Mathias Lopass, Business Initiative Manager Microsoft Cloud at Arvato Systems.

The Azure Stack consists of prefabricated hard and software coming directly from Microsoft. This is almost identical to the Microsoft public cloud solution, providing a range of platform services for cloud apps, serverless computing, microservices, and container management. “Serverless computing represents maximum flexibility and until now, was only possible in the public cloud”, explains Lopass. Companies no longer need to account for a fixed number of servers or virtual machines. Instead, they receive a scalable offer. This eliminates base costs, as services are only charged when they are used. This reduces the economic risks of new business models and supports companies in their innovation and digital transformation. With container services, it is relatively easy to configure existing applications and transfer them into the cloud.

Infrastructure services, such as encrypted storage, virtual machines and virtual networks as well as user interface, programming interfaces and license models are all compliant with the Azure Public Cloud. All these services are available in the ‘stack’ from the outset and are regularly updated by Microsoft. All applications in the Azure stack can be easily moved between public and private cloud or can be operated in both environments.

By installing Azure Stack, the company has added a new component to the cloud portfolio. Along with the Smart Shift private cloud approach, and the Arvato Systems AWS Business Group, Azure Stack is another important element in the implementation of Arvato Systems strategy.