A different kind of cloud

The stratus is back. Every autumn the same grey lid settles over the Lake Geneva basin and stays for days. Up on the Jura the sun is out and Mont Blanc is clear.

It comes less often than it used to (about 30 fog days a year at Cointrin in the 1970s, about 16 in the last decade, according to MeteoSwiss). Nobody in Geneva complains.

On Tuesday Bern went shopping for a different kind of cloud. It published the biggest IT tender in its history, up to CHF 7 billion of cloud over as long as 14 years, in three lots. At the briefing, officials needed an example of data harmless enough to store with any American or Chinese provider. They picked weather data.

Matthias Stürmer, who works on digital sustainability at the Bern University of Applied Sciences, didn't buy it. "Zurich airport depends on weather data every minute," he told SRF. Harmless, maybe. But you still can't do without it.

Most of the coverage since has been about whether Amazon, Microsoft or Swisscom will win. We wanted to know why Bern is doing this at all, so we read the plan behind it. The Federal Council's 2024 dispatch to Parliament, the tender, the audit office's review and the debates in both chambers.

Our read is that the plan is good. Honestly better written down than most company cloud strategies we have seen. The problem is that nobody in the federal administration is obliged to use it.

Two things run out at once

Bern runs its own private cloud, called Atlantica. Parts of it reach end of life from 2027. It's also short on capacity, and the dispatch admits it is so little automated that every bit of extra capacity pushes the running costs up hard.

The public cloud contracts are running out too. In 2021 Bern signed framework contracts with AWS, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Alibaba, with room for CHF 110 million. By last year the offices had used CHF 61 million of it, and according to DNIP only Microsoft and Amazon have projects running. Those contracts were extended to 2031 to bridge the gap.

Doing nothing would cost CHF 688.1 million up to 2032, according to the dispatch. That is about CHF 150 million more than building and running the new setup over the same years. The build alone is CHF 319.4 million, and Parliament approved the credit in 2024 without a single vote against, in either chamber. That doesn't happen often in Bern.

Sorting the data

The basic idea makes sense. Some government data needs a lot of protection, some needs very little. Keeping all of it in one place doesn't make sense.

Since January 2024 the Information Security Act sorts information into levels. The new cloud takes everything up to "high protection". Secret data stays out (the justice department and the army keep their own systems for that).

That gives three lots. Lot 1 is the global public cloud, with the data wherever the provider keeps it, for CHF 2 billion. Lot 2 is a cloud that stores and processes data only in Switzerland, on open-source software, also CHF 2 billion. Lot 3 is a private cloud inside the federal government's own data centres, for CHF 3 billion.

In 2027 the dispatch expects 92% of use to be private cloud. By 2032 it expects 68% public cloud, 10% public cloud running in federal data centres and only 22% private. We didn't expect that.

Lot 2 also changed along the way. In the 2024 plan, that middle level was hyperscaler services. The tender now asks for a Swiss-only, open-source cloud. In between, the National Council asked for open source where possible and Swiss companies where feasible. Nobody official says one led to the other. We think it did.

Planning the way out

We would copy the exit plan.

There are five awards (two, two and one), and no company can win twice. According to the tender, Bern wants to spread the risk of outages and security incidents, and depend less on any single supplier. On top of that the dispatch has an exit strategy, so Bern can change provider or level if the terms get worse. Most companies plan the move into the cloud in detail and think about leaving much later, if at all.

The entry rules are less convincing. Consortia aren't allowed, only one lead company with subcontractors. Digitale Gesellschaft reads the tender documents as also asking for CHF 500 million of annual turnover for lots 1 and 3. We couldn't find that figure in the public notice, so take it with some caution. But the old rule that providers needed data centres on three continents is gone. Stürmer thinks that lets more bidders in.

Nobody has to come

Now the weak spot. The Swiss Federal Audit Office reviewed the programme last year, and its report is worth reading in full.

The economic benefit for the Confederation as a whole is "yet to be demonstrated", it says. Federal offices don't have to use the new cloud, and none of them has committed to any volume. The auditors also had doubts about what operational autonomy (FOITT keeping things running with its own people if suppliers drop out) would really cost.

The 7 billion is a ceiling. The last one was 110 million and the offices used 61. If the departments keep their own arrangements, a lot of the new platform will sit unused.

Where we land

Romandy has a direct interest in this. In 2023 the seven Latin cantons wrote to the finance minister that they were strongly interested in using the federal cloud (they would pay to use it and leave the building to Bern). Vaud's digital delegate, Catherine Pugin, told the cantonal parliament that their work on a sovereign cloud helped to "reposition the Confederation, which wanted to give a public cloud to these big players".

Companies here can copy the basic approach without the budget. Sort the data by what it would cost you to lose it. And write down how you would leave before you sign anything.

We think the plan holds up. What we don't know is whether the administration will use it, and at what price. Applications close on 18 December and the awards are expected in late summer 2027. We'll come back to it when the five names are out.