In Switzerland, the topic of digital sovereignty is moving further into the political spotlight this year. At the beginning of July, the Canton of Geneva became the first canton ever to adopt an official digital sovereignty strategy. On the same day, it became known that the Confederation’s cyber specialists are deliberately seeking distance from Microsoft. The City of Zurich is testing “openDesk”, an open-source alternative to Microsoft 365, and in Germany the federal government and the states decided with the “Germany Stack” to make open file formats mandatory from 2028.
The driving force behind it: cutting costs and regaining control. The Confederation and the cantons have spent over 1.1 billion Swiss francs on Microsoft licences over the past ten years. In the City of Zurich, Microsoft costs have quadrupled in just seven years. And with the revised Data Protection Act (revDSG), the question of where data is stored and who can access it is no longer a gut feeling—it’s compliance.
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