Cyber attacks, but also maintenance errors or software problems, can result in the failure of centralised IT systems in public administration and affect its ability to act. In addition, the administration is heavily dependent on proprietary office and cloud solutions from individual, mostly non-European providers.
The project CKKI (Cloud-based Communication in Crisis) addresses this gap and aims to test digital sovereignty, interoperability and crisis resilience not only conceptually, but also under real conditions together with European cloud providers. In the project, openDesk is being used as open source-based office and collaboration software to provide German social insurance authorities with a second, independent communication channel in the event of a crisis. The solution bundles email, office applications, calendar, chat and document storage and is designed so that it can be used as a backup if an organisation’s primary IT fails. The project thus makes a concrete contribution to multi-provider cloud edge continuum by operating productive office and collaboration software in parallel on several cloud infrastructures. This demonstrates in practice that applications and data can remain available in the event of a crisis, even if individual providers or infrastructures are no longer accessible.
