Phoenix Systems takes sovereign cloud platform to the next level

Phoenix Systems wanted to migrate its sovereign cloud – which ensures data is stored locally within a specific country – onto a fully supported, open source platform to free up staff to focus on innovation. It partnered with Red Hat to provide a stable, scalable platform by migrating to Red Hat OpenShift. Swiss customers can now access their cloud platform via a self-service portal and move workloads to a hyper-protected environment in just one click, safe in the knowledge that they’re keeping their environments secure, compliant, sovereign, and easy to manage.

Benefits:

• Delivered time and cost efficiencies with a transparent, customer-centric sovereign cloud
• Empowered customers to self-serve
• Enhanced data privacy and compliance throughout application deployment

Phoenix Systems is a leading Swiss sovereign cloud provider. Its flexible cloud platform, kvant Cloud, gives customers from a range of sectors a choice of public or private cloud with total reassurance that their data will be stored in Switzerland, managed by Swiss developers, and built on open source technologies, avoiding potential vendor lock-in.

“It’s not just banks, healthcare providers and government who are concerned about data protection. All customer data is important, and they need to know it’s hosted in Switzerland and not under the jurisdiction of any other third parties,” said Angel Nunez, Group CTO, Phoenix Technologies.

The company provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as public and private virtual clouds. Due to its highly automated architecture, Phoenix Systems is able to deploy its Red Hat OpenShift-base cloud into customer data centers and operate it as a service for customers who don’t have an in-house IT team.

“A lot of widely used infrastructure solutions are not compatible with our sovereign cloud approach and risk vendor lock-in,” said Nunez. “Red Hat was the perfect choice because it’s open source and it’s very well supported. If there are any issues in the open source community, Red Hat is always the leading contributor trying to fix it.”

The strategic decision to partner with Red Hat meant the company could ensure a seamless transition for customers, and with a shared ethos of transparency and customer-centricity, Red Hat and Phoenix Systems were well aligned and working towards common goals.

Red Hat OpenShift, available on Phoenix kvant Cloud, simplifies building and scaling containerized applications on a trusted, consistent, hybrid cloud platform. The team is currently working to implement Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to simplify running and deploying workloads on virtual machines.

Phoenix Systems also uses the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system on virtual machines and bare metal to provide a secure and stable foundation for applications and to streamline adopting the latest OpenShift features and components. There are three availability zones strategically located in Zürich and an additional one in Basel to guarantee high availability of more than 99.99%.

Delivered time and cost efficiencies with a transparent, customer-centric sovereign cloud

With Red Hat OpenShift on kvant Cloud, Phoenix Systems can deliver a truly customer-centric cloud service, from meeting data sovereignty requirements, to eliminating complexity, and making cutting edge technologies accessible to customers with limited technical skills.

“I’m proud of how simple kvant Cloud is for users. They know their data is safe, they have access to great features, and all the complexity is abstracted,” said Nunez. “Best of all – there’s no vendor lock-in. We don’t force them into long contracts with us, and they can choose the right technologies to fit their needs.”

This level of transparency helps to build trust with customers. The flexibility of the environment also helps customers maintain legacy technology without needing to migrate to new solutions and retrain staff on how to use unfamiliar systems.

In addition, automation eliminates capacity and scalability issues. The system monitors cluster growth, enabling proactive decision-making and resource optimization. This improves customer service and reduces downtime for maintenance.

Empowered customers to self-serve

Phoenix Systems provides customers with a portal that both business and technical users can navigate easily. For example, business users can log in to understand which services they need to buy and click to complete the purchase. Technical users can then log into the same system to decide how to set up the environment within that budget.

This means business-focused staff don’t have to guess how many virtual machines or how much memory or CPU their company needs. They can simply cap their budget and let their colleagues optimize the platform.

“With Red Hat, we can give customers a better experience on the portal. Customers can click once to deploy workloads in a hyper secure environment or to move them to the cloud depending on their needs, it’s really that simple,” said Nunez.

Enhanced data privacy and compliance throughout application deployment

Phoenix Systems uses its Confidential Computing solution to secure OpenShift and ensure that data remains protected not only at rest, but during processing. The technology uses hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) to create isolated, secure areas, enhancing data privacy and compliance while enabling secure, scalable, and flexible containerized application deployment on OpenShift.

“With the enhanced security of kvant Cloud’s confidential computing and the automation capabilities of OpenShift, clients can trust in a secure, scalable environment that simplifies application deployment and management,” said Nunez.

Red Hat OpenShift on kvant Cloud is now available for customers in Switzerland, and Phoenix Systems and Red Hat continue to collaborate to bring advanced, cloud-based technologies to customers.

“Combining our expertise and sovereign cloud capabilities with Red Hat’s scale and open source knowledge is a powerful thing,” said Nunez. “The team shares our vision and we’re working with decision makers to make things happen for the good of the open source community and our customers in Switzerland.”

“The next logical step for Phoenix Technologies is to implement Red Hat OpenShift AI,” said Thomas Taroni, CEO, Phoenix Technologies, “enabling us to deliver a secure and sovereign AI-as-a-Service solution that empowers Swiss companies to leverage their data confidently.

“By aligning with Red Hat’s vision for AI, we are equipping our customers with unmatched flexibility, scalability, and security to build advanced AI applications.”