“German companies will spend around 17 billion euros this year on public cloud computing,” write ISG analysts in their current forecast for the German cloud market. Thus, the public cloud is the foundation of the digital transformation. However, according to a Kaspersky study, more than one-third of companies admit that they cannot say for certain whether and which company data is stored on their own network or with a cloud provider. So, the question of privacy and data security seems to still be an unsettled dilemma. As a German cloud service from a German provider, the Open Telekom Cloud may just win over the naysayers. Five start-ups show that, despite handling personal data and skeptical customers, they have made the leap into the public cloud.
TeleClinic’s founders: Patrick Palacín, Katharina Jünger, and Prof. Reinhard Meier. Talk to your doctor in the cloud via phone, chat, or computer: This is how TeleClinic uses the Open Telekom Cloud.
“We handle patient data and so trustworthiness is a top priority,” says Patrick Palacin, Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of TeleClinic. The Munich start-up seeks to digitize not only long waits in the waiting room, but also the entire doctor visit with a 24/7 “TeleClinic”. Patients can easily contact general practitioners and specialists via the app, website, or telephone. To support this business model, the company needed a provider with the kind of cloud service and reputation that would provide a firm foothold in the market: “Our partnership with Deutsche Telekom underlines our competence and our professionalism. Which opens doors faster, both for our patients – our customers – and for the health insurance companies we want to gain as partners,” explains Palacin.
The Hamburg start-up specializes in using artificial intelligence in medicine. To detect early-stage cancer, the company founded by Maximilian Waschka uploads highly encrypted MRI pictures to the Open Telekom Cloud for analysis. The cloud-based intelligence spots abnormalities, adds metadata to images, and then sends them back to the radiologist who requested the service.
The Open Telekom Cloud not only supports physicians with their medical history, but also with their diagnoses – using artificial intelligence. Fuse-AI, a Hamburg-based company, has developed a system that detects and classifies indications of cancer such as carcinoma on MRI images (magnetic resonance imaging). “The goal is to make it easier for radiologists to work with a computer-aided second opinion and to make diagnoses even more reliable and accurate,” says Maximilian Waschka, one of the four founders of Fuse-AI. Background: Radiologists often analyze several thousand MRI scans every day. Of course, their patients expect the closest attention to detail to keep mistakes from happening – a difficult task that Fuse-AI wants to simplify and optimize.
For this purpose, MRI recordings are transmitted in encrypted form to Deutsche Telekom’s highly secure data centers in Saxony-Anhalt, where they are analyzed: The cloud intelligence flags abnormalities, adds metadata to images, and then sends them back to the doctor. “The Open Telekom Cloud is an instrument that gives us the flexibility and scalability to realize such a solution,” says Dirk Schäfer, machine learning expert and co-founder of Fuse-AI. But carcinoma detection is only the beginning: “In the future, we will help identify even more common diseases much faster, more comprehensively and more reliably with the help of the Open Telekom Cloud,” says Sabrina Reimers-Kipping, a doctor of biochemistry and co-founder of Fuse-AI. Plus, according to Fuse-AI, their solution will also make it possible to save at least ten percent of the costs incurred by health insurance companies for examinations like MRIs.
The company established by Florian Fleischmann (left) and Christian Vetter translates clients’ business strategies into future staffing requirements and job profiles and then supplies big-data analyses of the labor market from the Open Telekom Cloud.
HRForecast makes forecasts of a completely different nature. What skills will employees in my industry need in the future? How many high school and university graduates are available with which qualifications and when? And how does the next generation really tick? Answers to these questions are like gold for companies. And HRForecast delivers them with the help of big data analyses from the Open Telekom Cloud.
The principle: Software collects as much information as possible from publicly available statistics and sources provided by the contracting companies themselves. HRForecast then analyzes the collected data with great computing effort and derives recommendations for action. In Germany of all places, however, HRForecast encountered unexpected hurdles. The company regularly uses comprehensive computing capacities from the cloud for its extensive analyses. Until recently, HRForecast used IT resources from Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Unfortunately, experience dictates that a US cloud provider often causes trepidation and security concerns, especially among German customers,” says Christian Vetter, one of the company founders.
Which is why HRForecast switched to the Open Telekom Cloud. The company now meets the demands of business customers in the German market.
A model from the KORAMIS lab: The company makes IT systems for power, production and industrial plants more secure by using the Open Telekom Cloud. Marco Di Filippo, Head of Cyber Security Engineering at KORAMIS.
The Saarbrücken company Koramis specializes in security for entire production plants. But there is still a real gap in the market, because process controls, plant controls, and industrial software are often poorly protected against attacks, given their relevance. According to The Mechanical Engineering Industry Association, half of all industrial companies suffered financial losses due to hacker attacks in 2017, and around a third (31 percent) reported production losses. An oddity, since industrial plants are often more vulnerable than an average office PC despite the fact that they are at the heart of many companies.
“The industry is much more targeted by hackers than the company is aware of,” says Marco Di Filippo, Head of Cyber Security Engineering at KORAMIS. Koramis offers help here – with analyses and security packages developed especially for the IT departments of chemical parks, transport companies, and smart factories. Among other things, the company uses simulations in the Open Telekom Cloud to discover IT vulnerabilities in production facilities and develops commensurate protective measures. Di Filippo: “The Open Telekom Cloud always delivers exactly the performance we need. Depending on the order, project type, and duration, we obtain virtual computing and storage resources at the click of a mouse.” At peak times, KORAMIS uses 250 processors; in normal operation this number drops to 16.
Services from KORAMIS are in demand. Also, because German data protection is crucial for the client. “Hosting and operation of the Open Telekom Cloud in Germany is governed by local law,” says Di Filippo. “And privacy is very important. A fact that certainly matters to our customers, who come from the energy and automotive industries, for example.”
The company established by Florian Fleischmann (left) and Christian Vetter translates clients’ business strategies into future staffing requirements and job profiles and then supplies big-data analyses of the labor market from the Open Telekom Cloud.
The construction industry is lagging in the digital transformation. NavVis wants to change this by creating digital copies of buildings in no time with 3D models and 360-degree panoramic photos designed to increase efficiency and collaboration on construction sites. The technical basis: the Open Telekom Cloud.
The images are taken with a trolley equipped with six 360-degree cameras and three laser scanners. By pushing the trolley through a building, it covers every angle, measures the interiors to the nearest centimeter, and digitizes them completely – up to 30,000 square meters per day. The data obtained are then exported to the centerpiece of the software: the IndoorViewer, which is used to view the exact 3D model of the rooms via a web browser. In addition, the recorded data serve as a basis for uncomplicated indoor navigation.
NavVis has filled a gap in the market with its worldwide unique system. Because, while streets and cities are already largely digitally captured by services such as Google Street View, only about 10 percent of interiors have been digitized. Telekom carries out the indoor scans and then processes and hosts the digital data in the Open Telekom Cloud. “Especially for German customers, proven data storage and processing according to the strict German data protection regulations is crucial,” says Patrick Eberwein, a start-up and partner manager for Deutsche Telekom. “The data in the scans are optimally protected in our highly secure, multicertified data centers.”
