According to a report by the Trade journal the Schwarz Group will continue its Cloud for German customers. The group, which owns the discounters Lidl and Kaufland, wants to offer a data protection-friendly alternative to the hyperscalers from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft bid. Recently, Microsoft has also made a bid in the Defending Your Data announced that customer data will be better protected from authorities in the future, but according to critics of the Group, this will not yet achieve the level of protection prescribed by the Basic Data Protection Regulation (DSGVO).
Internal use within the company and the allocation of test accesses to selected partner companies are to start as early as January. Marketing of the cloud offer to interested companies will then begin in mid 2021. The Schwarz Group's open cloud was first announced in 2019 as a cooperation with the energy provider EnBW and the tool manufacturer Würth.
No connection with Cloud Initiative Gaia-X
Although the goals of the Schwarz Group's Open Cloud are largely in line with those of Cloud initiative Gaia-X If the two projects coincide, they will be developed independently of each other. The Group cites the long development period of the government project as the reason for this.
"These initiatives are important and right, but experience shows that they take a long time. We must push ahead with the development of the cloud in our own interest and are pleased if the legislator supports us in this".
- Black IT Board of Directors Christian Müller
Openstack as technical basis
The technical basis of the Schwarz Group's cloud offering is the software Stackit, which was developed from the open source project Openstack. According to the company, the existing infrastructure of Kaufland and Lidl already uses Stackit. In a few weeks, it should also be possible to rent capacities from customers who can use the cloud for virtual machines (VM), databases, storage space and for containerisation through cubernets. In order to keep the energy requirements of the data centers as low as possible, the Schwarz Group is cooperating in their planning with the company Cloud&Heat, which has extensive experience with energy-efficient server farms.
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