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Digitization has made administration more efficient, but also more vulnerable. In a world where government processes are almost exclusively digital, collaboration across networked systems forms the central nervous system of the state. If failures occur here, standstill threatens. To escape this fate, the major German social insurance providers are now relying on strategic redundancy, which is intended to serve as a digital lifeline in an emergency.

Under the name “Cloud-based communication in crisis situations” (Cloudbasierte Kommunikation im Krisenfall, CKKI), a pilot project was launched a few days ago, marking a change in perspective. The Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund, the Bundesagentur für Arbeit, and the IT service providers Bitmarck and BG-Phoenics are trialing OpenDesk, the open-source alternative to the Microsoft 365 office suite developed by the Center for Digital Sovereignty (Zendis). The goal is to establish a fully functional emergency workplace that exists independently of the primary IT infrastructure.

According to Zendis, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs is funding the project, which is intended to demonstrate the resilience of the planned digital safety net by April. OpenDesk is more than just a chat application for crisis times. The suite offers a package of office software, email, calendar, project management, and video communication. Since the solution works purely browser-based, it allows employees to access it from almost any location and device. This flexibility is particularly crucial when physical locations or local networks can no longer be used safely.

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The four participating organizations each installed their own OpenDesk instances on different cloud infrastructures. The systems are now being tested in various scenarios to see how well they can communicate with each other. Whether interoperability will be maintained even when different cloud providers, such as project partners Ionos, Stackit, or T-Systems, serve as the basis is important. Zendis CEO Alexander Pockrandt sees this as confirmation of the chosen path: the flexibility of the solution ensures that critical infrastructure (Kritis) can be maintained even in extreme crisis.

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CKKI is not just designed as a disaster protection exercise for the German administration. The findings from the project are to be directly incorporated into the European cloud initiative 8ra. Thus, the German initiative is transforming into a building block for a larger, European vision of a sovereign and cross-provider IT infrastructure. Harald Joos, Cloud Commissioner of the Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund, emphasizes that the use of OpenDesk not only strengthens their own resilience. The participants also want to demonstrate to their European partners that sovereign cloud solutions are practical at the EU level.

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After OpenDesk has already been able to find its way into other areas such as the Bundeswehr or the public health service, the acid test in the discipline of high availability now follows. If the concept proves successful, the “emergency workplace from the cloud” could soon become standard repertoire for any authority that wants to assert its digital sovereignty not just on paper.