SCHUFA's digital strategy relies on the cloud as a powerful IT infrastructure—for the benefit of consumers and businesses.
The digital transformation of the economy and society continues to advance. SCHUFA aims to enable fast and secure business transactions even in an increasingly digital and service-oriented economy—using high-quality information and innovative services. To this end, it relies on a high-performance IT infrastructure: the cloud.
Using the cloud enables us to better support our corporate clients in digitizing their processes. At the same time, we aim to meet the needs of consumers, for example, through the new SCHUFA service portal. There, consumers can quickly and easily get help with questions and concerns related to SCHUFA. For us, cloud infrastructure is a key tool for accelerating digital transformation.
SCHUFA is already using the cloud for new applications and plans to gradually migrate existing products and services to the cloud. This allows us to gain experience and ensure a smooth transition. Compliance with legal requirements and the highest security standards is our top priority.
Behind the cloud is a service provider (cloud service provider) that provides scalable computing resources. These include cloud-based computing, storage, platform, and application services. As a company, we can access these resources as needed via the Internet. Instead of operating our own servers, the cloud enables flexible access to the cloud provider’s data centers.
- Security:
The cloud infrastructure provides us with the highest security standards. Our cloud partner is certified according to international standards. In addition, the data stored in the cloud is encrypted both during transmission and at rest. Access to this data is governed by strict access controls. Therefore, only individuals authorized by SCHUFA can access the data.
Scalability: Public cloud providers offer nearly unlimited resources that can be scaled up or down as needed. With the cloud, we can book additional capacity during short-term spikes in queries and flexibly reduce the booked computing power during quiet periods. This allows us, for example, to increase capacity during Black Friday week and reduce it during the summer months.
Speed: In the cloud, development environments, server capacity, and databases can be set up in no time. This gives us more time for development and allows us to significantly speed up product launches. Cloud providers also handle many tasks related to the maintenance, repair, and protection of hardware and software.
Sustainability: By flexibly scaling our capacity up or down, we use only the computing power we actually need. This allows us to reduce a significant portion of our IT infrastructure’s energy consumption and thereby contribute to the energy transition.
After careful evaluation, SCHUFA selected Amazon Web Services (AWS), the global market leader, as its cloud provider. AWS is known for its comprehensive security and compliance services, which meet the highest industry standards. AWS services are regularly certified and audited according to international security standards. We use the AWS cloud in Germany. This ensures that SCHUFA’s data remains within the EU and that all requirements of the EU GDPR are met. While we rely on AWS for our specialized applications and products, Microsoft Azure serves as the cloud infrastructure for our digital office communications.