Deutsche Bahn has now migrated its entire IT to the cloud, completing one of its biggest IT projects two years ahead of schedule.
The company decided in 2016 to fundamentally restructure its IT. Around 450 applications have since been moved to the cloud. DB sees the advantage of this in the increased level of flexibility: computing power and storage capacity automatically adapt to demand in real time. This makes all of DB’s systems run more reliably, even when put under extreme pressure, such as timetable information during a storm.
Now that this migration is complete, Deutsche Bahn has closed its in-house data centre.
“All of our IT is now fully in the cloud. That makes us a European leader and one of the first major companies that is fully banking on the cloud. This decision turned out to be just right in this age of corona. Our IT systems continued to work seamlessly when tens of thousands of employees had to switch to working from home. We were able to run all of our IT remotely. That wouldn't have been as easy with a physical data centre.”
In the cloud a virtual server, along with computing power, storage capacity and network can be made available in just a few minutes. The increased stability and protection against outages are of great importance, especially in crises. Stable IT operations are necessary for stable rail operations. All new things will go straight to the cloud in the future, such as new services based on artificial intelligence. In this way Deutsche Bahn wants to increase the speed of digitalisation and implement innovations and new customer services faster.
Deutsche Bahn sold its data centre. Almost all of the roughly 1,000 employees affected are continuing to work as IT experts in the company, many in the cloud environment.
“I'm very pleased that our experienced colleagues are continuing to push the digitalisation of the railway ahead. We've tried to make the new start as easy as possible.”
Deutsche Bahn keeps all of its data on European servers in Germany and the Netherlands, in compliance with data protection regulations.
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