France and Europe say they dream of it, only Switzerland has done it. The Swiss confederation will be the first country in Europe (after the principality of Monaco) to provide its administration with a sovereign cloud. The upper house of the Swiss parliament confirmed this choice at the beginning of December. The Swiss Government Cloud (SGC), as it is called, will be gradually implemented this year for definitive entry into operation in 2026. It will only host federal administration data. Cantons and municipalities will be able to benefit from the SGC “at cost” and there are no plans to make it available to the private sector.
Partial sovereignty
Concretely, the confederation will set up a “hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure”, relying both on cloud services internal to the Confederation, a private cloud, and on offers proposed by private providers (such as the Americans Microsoft, Google, IBM, the French Oracle or the Chinese Alibaba, selected in 2021), the “public cloud”. This option is far from ideal in terms of sovereignty, especially since the Federal Council estimates that in 2032, 78% of the administration’s needs will be covered by the public cloud. However, certain sovereign domains such as the army and internal security will escape the cloud and store their data physically. The goal of this hybrid system is to allow federal authorities to combine internal cloud services and those of external providers.
In summary, the main objective of the SGC is to modernize the private cloud of the confederation and to consolidate all systems into a central infrastructure. A gain in security, but also economic, advance the Senators. The project, costing 320 million Swiss francs (or 431 million euros), should, according to estimates, enable Switzerland to save around 24 million Swiss francs per year.
