Swisscom to Build “Neutral” Cloud
Swisscom is a cloud services provider based in Worblaufen, Switzerland. Due to recent revelations that the United States National Security Administration has secretly created and intercepted internet and cloud traffic from the world’s largest providers, Swisscom has stepped up and decided to make a cloud that is designed to keep the spying eyes of national intelligence services like the NSA out of the Swiss infrastructure.
Switzerland has long been known as a country that has a “Neutral” status when it comes to international affairs. Switzerland is also a country where foreigners like to open up discreet bank accounts as a means to conceal the size of their wealth. The Swiss banking system accounts for about 2 trillion US dollars in value. Given the fact that so many wealthy Americans use Swiss banking, privacy regarding these transactions remains the top priority.
Swisscom’s new project aims to create a cloud that will be both safe and secure for businesses located inside of Switzerland. Many businesses currently use cloud products that are based out of America and based on international news reports, these cloud infrastructures may have been compromised by intelligence agencies such as the American NSA. Former government IT contractor Edward Snowden recently released documents that show that the American NSA already has access to Google and Yahoo’s cloud infrastructure. Google engineers have commented that this access was not warranted. This incident has put many international enterprises on notice and they have since been looking for a new place to store their data in order to keep it safe from agencies such as the NSA.
Swisscom is actually partially owned by the Swiss government and Swisscom is one of the largest vendors for IT and Cloud infrastructure within the country. Being that Swisscom is a hybrid entity of the Swiss government, the need for a secure cloud without secret back doors becomes increasingly important for the booming financial sector and the government as a whole. FINMA, which is the financial legislation that Swiss banks must follow, says that all data transfer regarding Swiss accounts must happen inside the borders of the country making this new infrastructure that much more important.
