After federal authorities signed agreements last year with five international cloud service providers, the first load of data has been outsourced and uploaded – from the weather services.
After federal authorities signed agreements last year with five international cloud service providers, the first load of data has been outsourced and uploaded – from the weather services.
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MeteoSwiss is now storing “meteorological and climatological data” on a server based in Switzerland and operated by Amazon Web Services, the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper writes on Sunday.
A spokeswoman for the weather service told the paper that the decision to shift the data was based on a desire for better reliability. It was also motivated by the problem of “significantly increased data volumes”, she said.
The weather service has thus become the first official Swiss body to take advantage of the deals – worth CHF110 million ($123 million) – finalised last year with Alibaba, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.
The decision by Swiss authorities to outsource a certain amount of data storage sparked attention when announced in 2021, notably due to the appearance of a Chinese firm (Alibaba) in the list and the absence of any Swiss provider. General security fears were also raised, including by the Swiss Data Protection Commissioner, who said some of his concerns had not been properly addressed during the tender process.
The Federal Administrative Court also previously looked into a complaint brought by Google after it lost its bid to win a part of the contract. Google later dropped the appeal.
According to the NZZ am Sonntag, two other federal administration bodies are currently finalising the process of outsourcing data to the servers, while half a dozen others are examining the possibility of doing so.
Authorities previously said that the clouds would mainly be used to store public information “not in need of particular protection” – for example data which is already public. The NZZ am Sonntag writes that when it comes to the upload of “internal” information, i.e. non-public, the server in question must be physically located in Switzerland, even if operated by a US or Chinese firm.
This is wrong.
So stupid, but I am not surprised
We will shake our heads in a couple of years and the federal council will announce immediate measures after looking elsewhere the whole time.
This is pretty misleading title, the data remains in Switzerland and is operated by Swiss engineers and Swiss team in Switzerland. Just the companies are owned by nonswiss companies -like basically every large corporation that can actually meet their requirements – . Because local companies don’t have the ability to meet the needs of redundancy and availability and security needed for the Datacenters.
I really don’t get this protectionist element amongst the common sense island that is Switzerland
The only way to stand up to Amazon would be a European cooperation. Chinese providers are out of the question, of course, and while there are other options, none can match Amazon’s conditions.
If we want secure data storage for Europe, it needs to be a European solution.