TelefonSeelsorge chooses open source over a U.S. cloud provider
TelefonSeelsorge Deutschland (German Telephone Counseling Germany) completely rebuilt its digital system in 2025—based on Drupal 10 and using its own infrastructure, rather than a proprietary cloud provider. In a recent interview with Heise, Managing Director Lydia Seifert explains why this decision had nothing to do with short-term license changes by individual providers.
Data Protection as a Starting Point
TelefonSeelsorge Deutschland (German Telephone Counseling) promises every caller the greatest possible anonymity. For an organization with this commitment, the question of who controls its own infrastructure is no trivial matter. Control over its own data, a clear separation between organizational and counseling data, and as little stored personal information as possible: all of this is difficult to reconcile with a reliance on a single foreign cloud provider.
Although the trigger for the new development was that the previous system, based on Drupal 7, had reached the end of its life cycle, TelefonSeelsorge had already made the decision to use open source independently of that.
A structure comprising 104 independent offices
The new system must reflect a decentralized organization: 104 independent offices, 8,000 volunteers, and round-the-clock operations. It combines local autonomy with central control, along with its own infrastructure instead of rented cloud services. Accessibility was part of the architecture from the very beginning—not an afterthought.
The interview also addresses the widespread concern that open-source software is inherently less secure than proprietary solutions. Volkan Jacobsen, Managing Partner of Factorial.io, a Drupal e.V. member company, refutes this—and thereby confirms what is already the consensus within the community: transparent code provides greater security than relying on vendors’ promises.
The project was implemented by Factorial.io, a member company of Drupal e.V. For more information about the project, see the full case study.
You can read the full interview with Lydia Seifert and Volkan Jacobsen on Heise: "We didn't want to simply replace Microsoft"