Swiss cloud migration: why and how

The question is no longer "should we move to the cloud?" but "which cloud, under which jurisdiction, with which guarantees?". For a Swiss SME, these questions have concrete answers. and legal implications that cannot be ignored.

Why Swiss hosting is not a marketing argument

When a provider tells you "your data stays in Switzerland", it's not a cosmetic sales argument. It's a concrete legal difference.

The US CLOUD Act

The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act), passed in the United States in 2018, authorises US authorities to request access to data hosted by American companies. even if that data is physically stored in Europe or Switzerland. AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are American companies subject to this law.

In practice, the risk of a Swiss SME being directly targeted by a CLOUD Act request is low. But contractually, your provider cannot guarantee that your data will never be subject to it. This point is problematic for data subject to professional secrecy (doctors, lawyers, fiduciaries) or for sensitive customer data.

The Swiss Data Protection Act and international transfers

The revised Swiss Data Protection Act (FADP) requires that transfers of personal data abroad only take place to countries offering an adequate level of protection, or under appropriate contractual guarantees. Switzerland maintains its own list of recognised countries. it does not automatically follow EU decisions.

Hosting your data with a Swiss provider eliminates this question for the vast majority of processing operations.

Why Infomaniak

There are several Swiss hosting providers. Infomaniak stands out on several verifiable points:

• Data centres in Switzerland: Geneva and Winterthur, owned by Infomaniak
• Independent company: founded in 1994 in Geneva, with no external shareholder, no LBO debt
• Certifications: ISO 27001, 100% renewable energy
• No CLOUD Act: Infomaniak is a Swiss entity not subject to US law
• Collaborative suite: kSuite (email, calendar, storage, video) as a Swiss alternative to Google Workspace
• Transparent pricing: no hidden costs linked to data egress (egress fees)

These points are verifiable on Infomaniak's website and in their general terms and conditions. They are not provider claims.

What to migrate. and what not to migrate

Not everything needs to be in the cloud. Here is a practical reading grid:

Good candidate for migration: company email and calendar, shared file storage, off-site backups, web applications accessible from outside, test and development environments, rarely used servers.

Migration to assess case by case: critical ERP or business software (depends on the software's compatibility), large databases (transfer costs to evaluate), applications with very tight network latency constraints.

Can stay on-premise: network equipment, workstations, business software without a cloud version that works well locally.

The steps of a successful migration

Step 1: assessment

An inventory of all your servers, services, applications and their interdependencies. For each service: who uses it, how often, what the acceptable maintenance windows are, what data it contains. This step is essential and often underestimated.

Step 2: migration plan

Sequencing the migrations by order of priority and complexity. The simplest migrations first (email, backups) to validate the process, the most complex ones afterwards. A rollback plan must exist for each critical migration.

Step 3: gradual migration

Don't migrate everything at once. For critical services, a double-run period (the old and the new running in parallel) allows you to switch over without risk. Schedule the work outside business hours if an interruption is unavoidable.

Step 4: validation and documentation

Functional tests on the new environment, validation by users, updating the technical documentation, training if necessary. Only decommission the old infrastructure after a confirmed period of stability.

What it costs

Some benchmarks for an SME of 20 to 50 people:

• Email at Infomaniak: CHF 4 to 9 per user per month depending on the plan
• Cloud server (VPS): from CHF 15/month for a small server, CHF 80 to 200/month for a production server with 4-8 vCPU
• Off-site cloud backup: CHF 10 to 100/month depending on volume (generally 500 GB to 5 TB)
• Migration service: CHF 1,500 to 8,000 depending on complexity, billed by the provider carrying out the migration

The migration itself is a one-off cost. The monthly cloud running cost is generally comparable to or slightly higher than the old on-premise cost, but with less management, fewer risks of hardware failure and greater flexibility.

What not to do

Migrating without a prior assessment. Choosing a host solely on price without checking the quality of support and availability guarantees. Migrating without a rollback plan. Confusing "in the cloud" with "secure". the cloud reduces certain risks (hardware failures, fire) but introduces others (incorrect configuration, unauthorised access) if the migration is not done seriously.

A well-executed cloud migration is an investment that simplifies IT management over the long term. Done badly, it creates problems more costly than those it solves. If you are considering a move to Swiss hosting, that is precisely what our Swiss cloud migration offering covers, with a clear deliverable and no fixed-term commitment.