Actually, Deutsche Bahn had taken up to the year 2022 to fundamentally rebuild its computer infrastructure. But these days the last computers are being dismantled in the Berlin-Mahlsdorf data center.

Everything in the cloud At peak times, the railway had around 8000 Server operated itself in order to evaluate the huge data stream from the trains and the rail infrastructure. This also includes the sale of tickets via apps and the train website. The tasks of the railway IT also include operating the infrastructure for the DB Navigator smartphone app or the status of 28 in real time. 000 points to monitor. Just through the remote control of the turnouts, around 3600 malfunctions were detected and prevented early in the past year.

The own rail servers no longer exist. Everything comes from the cloud. These are Microsoft and Amazon data centers that provide storage space and computing power over the Internet with their Azure and AWS services. “We practically lifted the IT applications into the cloud under the rolling wheel and then optimized them further,” 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 were now able to start dismantling.”

“There nothing must wobble ” The customers of the railway should not even notice the renovation behind the scenes. With more than 1500 bookings per minute, it operates one of the largest ticket systems in Europe, which enables tickets to be purchased via digital channels such as bahn.de or the DB Navigator app. “That is our backbone, nothing should wobble. And that is also the case in the cloud.”

Quite the opposite: The DB Navigator app no ​​longer fights around when there is a big rush because the cloud servers can hardly be overloaded. When the Bahn’s board of directors decided in 2016 to 450 applications of the Bahn in the cloud relocate, the decision was also received critically by the public. After all, it was already becoming apparent at that time that a US group would come into play, which in case of doubt would be subject to US law.

US provider under criticism It has not only been clear since Edward Snowden’s revelations that data protection laws in the USA are significantly more lax and that services such as the NSA collect data on people and companies on a large scale. This data protection gap between Europe and the USA recently played a role in the judgment of the European Court of Justice (“Schrems II”), which overturned the EU data protection agreement “Privacy Shield” with the USA. According to this, the standard contracts that providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google provide to meet the legal obligations for their customers in Europe are not sufficient.

Railway IT boss Koenen says: “We have of course, right at the beginning of the project, a very special focus was placed on security and data protection. ” On the one hand, Deutsche Bahn relies on hard encryption to prevent curious glances from US services: “We encrypt all data and only we can decrypt it. That means that only we have access to the keys and not the cloud provider “, emphasizes the managing director of the railway IT subsidiary DB Systel. Therefore, the railway can also operate applications in which data protection plays an important role in the cloud.

Encryption and small print In addition to technical protection, the railway also relies on small print: “We have contractually secured this with the cloud providers and regularly check compliance.” The railway only uses European data centers in Frankfurt – which Amazon Web Service has specifically expanded for this purpose – and in the Netherlands.

Nevertheless, 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, providers from Germany or Europe were left with nothing. “At the time of the tender there was between the suppliers from the USA and the European We