Switzerland begins testing alternatives to Microsoft 365 to protect its “most sensitive data” and strengthen digital sovereignty

Switzerland’s federal government wants to move away from any reliance on Microsoft 365, as it begins testing alternatives to replace the American-made software suite. It’s a recurring theme of European countries pursuing digital sovereignty, as we saw earlier this year when the French government began dropping Windows 10/11 in favor of Linux-based operating system ‘distros’.

Alternatives to Microsoft’s long-standing ‘Office’ mainstays already exist, with ‘Euro-Office’, for example, advertising itself as a “sovereign solution for collaborative document editing“, so finding potential picks presumably wouldn’t be too difficult. However, choosing which app replacement to trust with the Swiss government’s “most sensitive data” will be the hard part (via It’s FOSS).

For my money, the most interesting part is the data protection reasoning, as Professor Matthias Stürmer at Bern University of Applied Sciences described his concerns about the implied risk of leaks from a system controlled by foreign governments. Stürmer predictably lists rising license costs as a secondary problem, but it’s frontloaded by the move away from America’s Microsoft.