The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is Germany's research center for aeronautics, space, energy, transport and security. It develops technologies for space travel, operates satellite missions and conducts research into innovative aircraft concepts. DLR also works on solutions for sustainable energy supply and future-proof mobility. It provides sound scientific advice to politics, industry and society.
DLR's more than 11,700 employees work at its headquarters in Cologne and at a further 30 locations in Germany as well as at 4 offices abroad. In its research and development work, DLR cooperates with other research institutions and industry worldwide, in particular very closely with ESA.
In the area of IT security, the German Aerospace Center is subject to high security standards, as it works with sensitive research data and security-relevant technologies. DLR is guided by standards such as ISO/IEC 27001 (information security management) and the BSI's IT baseline protection.
These high requirements as well as the use of a delivery solution customized to DLR were the basic building blocks for DLR's decision to cooperate with DATAGROUP since 2016.
DATAGROUP delivers IT services for DLR with CORBOX. Since the beginning of the cooperation in 2016, DATAGROUP, in particular the Defense IT Services business unit, has been responsible for IT in the area of business information systems (BWIS). With an encapsulated system in two active-active data centers, DATAGROUP offers systems that are available at all times.
The infrastructure of the business information systems requires error-free and fail-safe systems running around the clock as well as trustful cooperation at all levels. A core team of DATAGROUP employees, who have been personally approved by the customer following a security check, as well as 80 additional employees, who are all known to the customer by name, provide a comprehensive range of managed services in the areas of servers, storage and backup & restore. As well as SAP Operating & Hosting, Managed Database for Oracle and MS SQL databases and Application Management Services. The services provided, including the operation of the SAP landscape and an archive system linked to SAP as well as a VMware cluster as a platform for the application servers and databases and associated processes, are ITIL and ISO 20000 compliant.
Transparency and constant exchange between the DLR IT managers and the DATAGROUP experts form the basis of this cooperation. At the weekly operations meeting, daily operations, change requests or legally required adjustments, any faults and tickets that have arisen are discussed at a technical level. Reporting for all services is provided on a monthly basis. Open, transparent feedback is provided at the half-yearly service review meetings at director and division manager level.
In order to meet the high and constantly growing quality targets, DATAGROUP has expanded the technical skills of the employees involved to include knowledge and skills tailored to customer requirements and ensures that these are further developed and safeguarded over the course of the project.
As part of the joint operational work, the contacts also exchange information on technological innovations and examine the added value for DLR. Functional enhancements have been derived from this and jointly implemented in areas such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and SAP (BTP and Analytics Cloud).