The federal government of Germany has established a highly secure cloud platform for storing classified information up to the classification level of “secret.” This platform is primarily intended for information and processes with the protection requirement of “very high” and has been approved by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). The government has allocated approximately €315 million from the federal budget for this platform between 2020 and 2024.
The government aims to ensure communication and the ability to act in all situations with an increased need for protection. It also intends to strengthen digital sovereignty, cyber security, and crisis resilience to protect the state’s and the economy’s secrets. The platform will be connected to federal states, and its expansion will open it up to communication with partner countries and the economy subject to confidentiality protection.
The setup of this platform is part of the federal measure “Interdepartmental VS Communication” (R-VSK), and the Federal Ministry of the Interior is accountable. The Federal Foreign Office will handle its supervision. Three geo-redundant, highly available secret data centers are being established for this cloud platform. The platform is accessible via all public and state provider networks. The security is guaranteed through the use of national cryptographic processes approved by the BSI.
Third-party services are not used in this field, but the establishment of further secure cloud solutions will be examined. Luxembourg presented a similar national Cyber Defense Cloud worth around €250 million on March 6, 2023, hosted on-site in secure data centers. The federal government will not participate because a comparable offer is available with the R-VSK.
The executive announced in 2019 that numerous ministries and authorities use cloud services for data exchange with external parties and various other purposes from more than 50 providers. These include Adobe, AWS, Citrix, Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, and WeTransfer. However, these services cannot be obtained from the federal cloud, which is designed for processing classified information up to the “VS – Only for official use” classification level and can only be accessed from the federal VS networks.
