How CloudSigma Helped IT Provider DARZ Enrich its Services Portfolio and Provide its Customers with an Unmatched Infrastructure Solution

Partner Profile

DARZ is a digital evolution provider with its own data center. As a global platform for IT and technological innovation, the company acts as a full-service IT provider with its own high-security data center and also markets modular services in the public and private cloud as well as colocation.
DARZ provides its customers and partners with leading edge infrastructures, services and know-how of the highest quality and security to meet current and future digital challenges and gain competitive advantages. In this context, DARZ offers its customers a platform that brings real innovation through the unique combination of infrastructure, technology, partnerships and know-how.

As part of its rich portfolio, DARZ wanted to partner with a cloud provider. This is how DARZ started looking for cloud companies to enrich their service portfolio and found Cloudsigma back in 2016.

“We evaluated several vendors and chose CloudSigma because in their cloud you can design your environment to fit your needs, with highly flexible server sizes, high availability, tiered storage, advanced networking and unbelievable performance.”Lars Goebel, Director Strategy & Innovation @ DARZ GmbH

The Challenge

DARZ acts as a full IT service provider with its own data center. In addition to performance, the other notable features of the data center include their distinct modularity, flexibility and scalability. This allows each customer to select the relevant services at a dedicated time in quantity, quality and in combination with other services. All services are highly individualized thanks to the possibility of multiple combinations – a prerequisite for developing real innovations with the aid of technology.

Aiming to offer tailored and flexible services, DARZ was naturally looking for cloud providers to enhance their services portfolio with a cloud offering that can provide flexibility and variability to the end-user, and at the same time offer the expected degree of performance matching DARZ expectations.

At the same time, DARZ was impressed by the global market coverage and the fast growth rate of CloudSigma.

“In our opinion, it is becoming increasingly important for customers to have multiple locations worldwide to choose from. At that time we have seen and still see that CS is growing very fast.”

The Solution

Despite the fact that DARZ has always offered fast connectivity to its customers and to a number of other hyperscalers, CloudSigma is the only public cloud that is deployed directly in the DARZ data center in Darmstadt. This allows for different zero-latency infrastructure scenarios – from hybrid cloud, to backup and disaster recovery. For example, CloudSigma’s secure hybrid cloud technology allows direct, secure, private IP only connectivity between private networks in the cloud and private infrastructure – all within the DARZ data center in Darmstadt or any of the data centers connected via multiple 100Gbps to DARZ in the Frankfurt region.

CloudSigma’s hybrid cloud offer allows companies to connect their existing infrastructure residing at DARZ data center or at any of the data center hubs connected to DARZ data center to the public cloud through privately delivered connectivity. This provides companies with anytime access to large-scale Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings to scale computing resources flexibly and cost-efficiently with high reliability and security.

“It was serendipity that DARZ met CloudSigma at just the moment when DARZ was launching its own next generation hybrid cloud solution. By bringing on board CloudSigma as a partner within our data center, DARZ can offer a leading public cloud provider within its facility for cloud bursting, disaster recovery and more.”Lars Goebel, Director Strategy & Innovation @ DARZ GmbH.

In addition, due to Germany’s strict data protection framework, CloudSigma founded a subsidiary company CloudSigma Germany, so that the whole solution is offered subject only to local German law. Therefore, the German cloud location provides a 100% German law infrastructure solution without exposure to the US patriot act or other legal jurisdictions.

Furthermore, by making use of DARZ existing multiple internet connectivity lines, CloudSigma offers a Network-as-a-Service product, complete with intrusion and DDoS protection, giving customers managed high availability public Internet access for their racks in the DARZ data center.

The Implementation

For DARZ the smooth collaboration between the two companies and the professionalism of CloudSigma’s team while implementing the cloud has been of great importance. These factors contribute to the smooth running of the installation process:

“The quality, the competence and the speed of your technical teams was very notable during the installation period. Everything was very well prepared and ran accordingly very fast.”

One thing that distinguishes CloudSigma from other cloud vendors offering Cloud-as-a-Service partnerships is the overall onboarding that is being carefully planned, prepared and carried out. CloudSigma provides not only a cloud stack, but a fully-managed public cloud solution, which comes along with the required operational support, technical trainings, sales & marketing onboarding, escalation procedures and the whole synchronization between the partnering teams to ensure a smooth market launch and aligned team efforts.

“The onboarding was very easy and was successfully concluded without any challenges because our various teams were very well prepared in advance by the colleagues at CloudSigma.”

The Impact

18 months after the deployment DARZ shares that the company is extremely satisfied with the overall performance of the cloud.

“The infrastructure is extremely stable, there is virtually no service disruption. Customers also give positive feedback about performance, which I think is mainly due to the last generation hardware technology being used. So quality, stability and speed are all very very good.”Lars Goebel, Director Strategy & Innovation @ DARZ GmbH

According to DARZ sales team, the CloudSigma cloud has gained wide acceptance among the German customers primarily because of the quality, the price/performance ratio and the high level of customization.

“Our customers love the self-service portal where you can granularly configure and customize the various pieces of your infrastructure to match your exact needs.”

Naturally, CloudSigma has become an important value-added product in DARZ broad portfolio.

“With CloudSigma, today we can offer our customers an unmatched infrastructure solution, which combines on-demand scalability, high flexibility and short contract terms. This unique combination makes CloudSigma a significant addition to our portfolio of services, since it helps us serve a variety of infrastructure requirements.”

Last but not least, the relatively small company size of both CloudSigma and DARZ allows for a very close partnership and agile reaction to market changes. As a result, both partner companies are currently working on a number of joint services to be launched in 2018.