Monday, November 04, 2013

Swisscom builds ‘Swiss Cloud’ as spying storm rages...

Swisscom is building a “Swiss Cloud” that could loosen the grip of U.S. technology giants and attract foreign companies looking for a way to shield sensitive data from the prying eyes of foreign intelligence services.

Companies are increasingly turning to cloud computing – an umbrella term for technology services such as email and business software offered remotely via the Internet instead of on-site – to cut costs and add flexibility to their IT departments.

But revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) secretly gathered user data from nine big U.S. tech companies including Google, Apple and Facebook has demonstrated that privacy for users of cloud services can be compromised, and some suggest customers could seek out alternatives to the dominant U.S. providers to try and protect sensitive information.

Swisscom’s head of IT services Andreas Koenig told Reuters the telecom provider’s decision to set up a home cloud was unrelated to the recent NSA revelations and driven more by a desire to cut costs and make its systems more dynamic.

Still, as the technology to protect against illegal threats progresses, Koenig says it will start to make more sense to store data in locations where strict privacy laws make it harder to retrieve sensitive information. Full story...

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  3. German intelligence service is as bad as the NSA...
  4. Internet freedom on decline worldwide as governments tighten grip...
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  6. Snowden: NSA "in bed together with the Germans"
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