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In fact, it took Deutsche Bahn until 2022 to radically rebuild its IT infrastructure. But these days the latest computers are being dismantled in the Berlin-Mahlsdorf data center.
All in the cloud
At rush hour, the railroad itself ran around 8,000 servers to assess the huge flow of data from the trains and rail infrastructure. This also includes ticket sales via the app and the train website. Railway IT’s duties also include operating the infrastructure for the DB Navigator smartphone app or monitoring the status of 28,000 points in real time. Through remote control of switches alone, approximately 3,600 failures were detected and prevented at an early stage last year.
The company’s rail servers no longer exist. Everything comes from the cloud. These are Microsoft and Amazon data centers that provide storage space and computing power on the Internet with their Azure and AWS services. “We practically moved the IT applications to the cloud under the wheel and then further optimized it,” says Christa Koenen, Head of IT at Deutsche Bahn. “We have now migrated several hundred applications to the cloud. And after the last application left our data center two weeks ago, we have now been able to begin decommissioning.”
“Nothing should swing”
Railroad customers should ideally not notice anything behind the scenes of the renovation. With over 1,500 bookings per minute, it operates one of the largest ticket systems in Europe, which allows you to buy tickets via digital channels such as bahn.de or the DB Navigator app. “This is our backbone, nothing should waver. And this is also the case with the cloud.”
On the contrary: the DB Navigator app no longer creates bugs when there is a big rush because the cloud servers can hardly be overloaded. When the Bahn’s board of directors made the decision in 2016 to move Deutsche Bahn’s 450 applications to the cloud, the decision was also critically received by the public. After all, it was already becoming evident at the time that a US group would be involved, which if in doubt would be subject to US law.
US suppliers under fire
It wasn’t just from Edward Snowden’s revelations that it became clear that data protection laws in the United States are significantly more lax and that services like the NSA collect large amounts of data about people and companies. This data protection gap between Europe and the US recently played a role in the ruling of the European Court of Justice (“Schrems II”), which overturned the EU’s “Privacy Shield” data protection agreement with states. United. Consequently, the standard contracts that vendors like Amazon, Microsoft and Google provide to meet legal obligations for their customers in Europe are not enough.
Koenen, head of Bahn IT, says: “At the beginning of the project we naturally placed a very special focus on security and data protection.” On the one hand, Deutsche Bahn relies on hardware encryption to avoid curious glances from US services: “We encrypt all data and only we can decrypt it. This means that only we have access to the keys and not the cloud provider”, points out. ‘CEO of the DB Systel railway IT branch. This means that railways can also run applications where data protection plays an important role in the cloud.
Encryption and small fonts
In addition to technical protection, the railroad also relies on small print: “We have contractually secured it with cloud providers and regularly check compliance.” The railway uses only European data centers in Frankfurt – which Amazon Web Service has specifically expanded for this purpose – and in the Netherlands.
However, Koenen sees the danger of becoming dependent on a large cloud operator. The railway is therefore pursuing a “multi-cloud strategy”. In addition to Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure is also used. However, suppliers from Germany or Europe are left with nothing. “At the time of the tender, there was still a clear functional gap between suppliers from the US and European competitors. And, in my opinion, that hasn’t changed sufficiently yet,” says Koenen.
Possibility of change
But that could change. Deutsche Bahn will continue to monitor the market as the cloud landscape will continue to develop over the next few years. “And it is entirely possible that we will change the cloud service provider accordingly.”
The change also affected approximately 1,000 employees who were employed in rail data centers. “We were able to keep almost all of them and train them further.” Many would have gotten a so-called cloud driver’s license and now work in cloud services management. Some have even gone into software development and written programs for Deutsche Bahn. Specialists are still sought after here: Deutsche Bahn hires around 1,000 IT and digital experts every year, and the trend is increasing.
(kbe)
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