German real-estate company Garbe is switching to Deutsche Telekom’s cloud environment powered by Microsoft Azure.

The real-estate industry is going through a digital transformation. Garbe – a real-estate managing company with Europe-wide operations –developed a strategy to digitalise its business processes. The objective was high data availability for customers, service providers and employees plus mobile work, all holistic and with IT security. 

To implement its digital strategy, Garbe is migrating its on-premises IT to a highly available and flexible cloud-based IT infrastructure. It puts the focus on the user, is scalable, and supports the company’s growth and internationalisation.

Garbe chose Deutsche Telekom as its partner for this task, enabling the real-estate company to acquire all ICT services from one source.

Garbe offers a service portfolio for logistics, retail, residential and office real estate. These services comprise portfolio, investment, asset and property management as well as project development. With 400 employees, Garbe takes care of the entire value creation of real estate. To this end, the company manages real-estate assets of around €13bn in Germany and the rest of Europe.

“As a real-estate company operating across Europe, we are active at 16 locations and therefore rely on high-quality, durable and flexible IT,” said Christopher Garbe, managing partner of Garbe. “This allows us to ensure efficient collaboration and excellent data availability for our customers. We will profit from the economies of scale offers by a Microsoft cloud managed by Deutsche Telekom as well as further harmonised Magenta options. This also reduces energy and emissions.”

A study shows the Microsoft cloud is as much as 93 per cent more energy-efficient and as much as 98 per cent more carbon-efficient than on-premises IT.

Garbe is switching to Deutsche Telekom’s cloud environment powered by Microsoft Azure. The Magenta portfolio includes data lines for customer sites in Germany, Amsterdam and Vienna. Deutsche Telekom takes care of the hardware for the workstations. The company also supplies mobile communication devices from smartphones to laptops.

For this, the Magenta business collaborations option provided by Deutsche Telekom simplifies collaboration with the user. Virtual telephone systems and other software tools enable the Garbe teams to work seamlessly in the digital environment.

The package is rounded off with security that ensures virtual collaboration is secure at all times. This includes a security operations centre with security information and event management. It monitors data traffic, evaluates risks and, where necessary, initiates countermeasures. Garbe also considers cyber defence-as-a-service to be a key element of collaboration with users and investors.

“To implement our digitalisation strategy, we require a flexible and future-ready network with high security standards that is based on a solid infrastructure and fully supports us as a real estate manager,” said Friederike Buchheister, head of IT and digitalisation at Garbe. “With Deutsche Telekom, we have found the ideal strategic partner to further advance our digital transformation.”

Hagen Rickmann, director for business customers at Deutsche Telekom, added: “A successful real-estate developer such as Garbe requires agile, secure and efficient ICT for its core business. Not only that, digitalisation offers numerous options when it comes to tackling sustainability together. We at Telekom are a partner for the entire process, from remote maintenance of elevators via the IoT to intelligent building management.”