Dynamic cloud infrastructures are essential for companies to respond to the constantly changing market and growing competition. However, cyber criminals are exploiting the vulnerabilities in a targeted manner. The consequences for affected organizations are enormous: as a bitkom study shows, the costs of cyberattacks for German companies recently amounted to 223.5 billion euros per year. What they need is a secure cloud infrastructure that reliably protects them from attacks, as well as the corresponding expertise for IT experts that they need for prevention and acute attacks.

Secure cloud infrastructure: future-proofing Germany and the region

The signing of the cooperation agreement between Fraunhofer IESE and Worms University of Applied Sciences has created a comprehensive infrastructure that enables research into secure clouds and provides companies with comprehensive services and measures for cloud security - from conducting penetration tests and evaluating cloud security measures to access to the Fraunhofer laboratory environment.

At the same time, the consortium offers application-oriented training in an innovative learning environment that optimally prepares IT managers for current and future challenges and makes them fit for legal regulations such as NIS-2.

Prof. Dr. Hans Rück, Vice President of Worms University of Applied Sciences, comments: “The topics of secure cloud and data sovereignty are essential to future-proof Germany as a location for science and business. With our learning lab, we also want to position our institute more strongly as a research university, get students interested in research in this area and pave the way for young experts in the region.”

Denis Feth, Department Head “Security Engineering” at Fraunhofer IESE, adds: “Our learning lab addresses the agricultural industry and finance, among others - but we also look at other fields of application and always strive to collaborate with institutes and 

Strengthening the Worms-Kaiserslautern economic region

The consortium of Fraunhofer IESE and Worms University of Applied Sciences promotes regional collaboration between the two institutions and brings their many years of joint experience in secure cloud computing to the regional and national network and to customers in the banking and agricultural sectors in this region. It thus makes a significant contribution to strengthening the city of Worms and the federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

“The teaching activities of Fraunhofer experts at the departments of our university not only offer a valuable transfer of know-how, but also promote mutual development for both our students and the employees of Fraunhofer IESE. The cooperative supervision of research-related, practice-oriented theses and the recruitment of young talent, from which both sides benefit, also helps to establish the region as an innovative location in the field of secure cloud computing,” says Jens Kohler, Professor of Secure Software and System Development at Worms University of Applied Sciences.

“The great strength of our collaboration is that we can put the results of our joint research directly into practice,” agrees Dr. Raphaela Schätz, Head of the Cybersecurity Learning Lab. “The scientists' current research knowledge flows directly into the training courses, so that our customers benefit directly from the latest research in IT security.”

The cybersecurity learning lab's training formats range from open seminars and in-house offers to intensive training courses in the distributed learning lab. There are also regular events such as hackathons and networking events where technical specialists, decision-makers and political players can exchange ideas with each other. Individuals as well as smaller and larger teams will find the right learning opportunities here: https://www.cybersicherheit.fraunhofer.de/.