After federal authorities signed agreements last year with five international cloud service providers, the first load of data has been outsourced – from the national weather service.
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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 wrote 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 issue of “significantly increased data volumes”, she said.
MeteoSwiss 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 tendering process.
The Federal Administrative Court also 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.
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