Several US providers and Alibaba have received a major order: They will secure Swiss government data in the future. In addition to the US providers Amazon, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, the Chinese cloud provider won a tender with a total volume of 110 million Swiss francs.

Swiss or European cloud providers not taken into account, reports the Day indicator. The price was particularly important in the invitation to tender, because the costs were weighted at thirty percent in the award criteria. Here in particular, Alibaba was able to score.

Costs more important than location

Microsoft and Amazon operate data centers in Switzerland. However, this factor only played a ten percent role. The fact that Alibaba has neither a cloud location nor a legal offshoot in Switzerland was given a correspondingly low weighting – a subsidiary in London, on the other hand, is the contracting partner of the federal government.

It is not known exactly which data should be outsourced. In view of the Cloud Act, however, it is questionable whether information is in good hands with US providers even in local data centers from the point of view of data protection and data security. Data protectionists, for example, view the use of Microsoft 365 in local schools with a correspondingly critical view.

Between the cloud fronts

The order underlines the current dominance of a few cloud providers: Alibaba is investing heavily in its cloud business and is already the market leader in Asia. The main competitors from the USA for global business are Microsoft and Amazon.

In Europe, Gaia-X should now mature into an alternative, with values ​​such as data protection, digital sovereignty, trust, transparency and openness. The fact that providers from the USA and China are now also on board has caused astonishment and criticism.

(fo)