(new: share price updated, more background.)

FRANKFURT (dpa-AFX Broker) - A major order from the German government drove the shares of cloud provider Ionos to a record high on Tuesday. The shares of the company, which is listed in the second-line index SDax, climbed to 23.75 euros in the morning.

Most recently, the shares of the United Internet subsidiary led the SDax with an increase of around eleven percent to 23.55 euros. The shares of the MDax parent company rose by almost 5 percent in the morning. United Internet thus once again tested the upper edge of the downward trend that began at the end of January.

Ionos was awarded a major contract by the federal administration to set up a particularly strictly secured computer cloud solution. An upper limit of 410 million euros was specified in the tender for the framework agreement. The "private enterprise cloud", which has been certified by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), among others, is to be operated in the data centers of the Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund).

By way of comparison, Ionos increased its turnover by a tenth to a good 1.4 billion euros in 2023 and achieved earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of 390 million euros, adjusted for one-off effects.

The special feature of the Ionos solution for the federal administration is that the platform is not connected to the public Internet. It uses a concept known as "air gapping". This makes it almost impossible for outsiders to access sensitive information. With "air gapping", the computers are separated from the networks and the data traffic for software updates, for example, is then handled using portable storage media.

United Internet floated Ionos on the stock exchange in February 2023 at a price of EUR 18.50 per share. This was followed by a slide below the EUR 12 mark until October, before an upward trend began./mis/ngu/men