Switzerland just finished installing Microsoft 365 on roughly 54,000 government workstations. Now it wants out. A Federal Chancellery spokesman told NZZ am Sonntag the administration "aims to reduce its dependency on Microsoft, step by step and in the long term." The timing is awkward, to put it mildly.
The push comes down to the US Cloud Act, which lets American authorities access data held by US companies regardless of where servers are physically located. Swiss government data running through Microsoft could, in theory, be pulled by US officials. Former army chief Thomas Süssli has called for faster movement on alternatives. A feasibility study now confirms open-source replacements are viable.
Germany provides the most relevant reference point. Munich's LiMux project started migrating 15,000 workstations to Linux in 2003 and had largely completed the switch by 2013. It worked, but it also exposed real friction with document compatibility and training costs. Munich eventually walked some of it back, returning to Microsoft around 2017. Germany's newer Sovereign Cloud Stack initiative and companies like Nextcloud have since built more mature alternatives designed to keep government data out of American hands. Swiss authorities are paying attention.
The scale of the challenge is visible through tools like MXmap, which tracks email providers across Swiss municipalities and reveals how deeply Microsoft and other US services are embedded in Swiss public infrastructure. Replacing those systems will take years and require retraining thousands of civil servants. But the European AI sovereignty argument is catching on across Europe. If Switzerland pulls this off, other governments will follow.