Deloitte Germany has partnered with STACKIT to help customers adopt the latter firm’s cloud platform. 

Deloitte is the world’s largest professional services network with about 460,000 employees. Its German member firm employed more than 13,000 of those staffers as of last May. STACKIT, in turn, is the public cloud business of retail giant Schwarz Group. The latter company is best known for operating the Lidl supermarket chain. 

STACKIT offers a more limited feature set than the hyperscale U.S. cloud providers that compete in the German market. But it’s a locally-owned company with local data centers, which makes its platform a competitive choice for banks and other highly regulated organizations. In many cases, such firms are legally required to keep customer data locally.

Deloitte’s partnership with STACKIT spans multiple areas. First, its consultants will help clients move workloads to the Lidl sister company’s platform. Deloitte can also play a role in the day-to-day management of cloud environments. The firm plans to provide its STACKIT-related services under a delivery model it dubs “Advise–Implement–Operate.”

“This model encompasses strategic guidance (advise), hands-on implementation (implement), and ongoing operational support (operate),” a Deloitte Germany spokesperson explained to Boardroom Insight. “We offer our clients end-to-end services including cloud environment maintenance tasks and related optimization of workloads.”

STACKIT’s cloud platform is powered by three data centers in Germany and Austria. One of the facilities is located on the site of Schwarz Group’s global headquarters. Another data center, STACKIT’s sole Austrian site, sits near a river that it uses for cooling.

Risk-averse customers can distribute their workloads across the firm’s data centers to reduce the chance of downtime. If one of the facilities goes offline, workloads can keep running in the others. STACKIT also promises to lower the risk of cyberattacks with a service called STACKIT Confidential Server. It isolates customers’ virtual machines from one another using the underlying processors’ built-in encryption features. This isolation makes it harder for malware to spread between virtual machines.

According to STACKIT, its encryption features make it easier for highly regulated organizations to meet their cybersecurity obligations. Some of those obligations are defined in widely-used, but voluntary data protection guidelines such as the ISO 27001 standard. Many other rules are legally mandated by regulators. The Deloitte Germany spokesperson cited the firm’s regulatory know-how as one of the competitive differentiators in its STACKIT partnership. Clients can hire the Big Four consultancy to ensure that their STACKIT environments adhere to applicable data protection standards.  

“What makes Deloitte also unique are strategic collaborations with some of the world’s largest technology firms and innovators, with whom we are building connections and designing offerings that empower clients to address complex challenges, mitigate risk, ignite innovation, and fuel competitive advantages,” the spokesperson added. 

Photo courtesy of Deloitte