Swisscom sets to build an own "Swiss Cloud"-- one promising to rival likes of Amazon and Google by being free of snooping from foreign intelligence services. 

Reportedly the decision to build a home cloud is "unrelated" to recent revelations involving the US National Security Agency (NSA) gathering user data from 9 US companies (including Google, Apple and Facebook), but Swisscom head of IT services Andreas Koening tells Reuters "data protection and privacy is a long tradition in Switzerland, and that's why it's pretty difficult to get to something." 

Koening also says "if legal requirements are there and we are asked by the judge to obtain or deliver certain information then we would obviously have to comply with it."

The Swisscom cloud promises to be at "the forefront" of security, and tight Swiss privacy policies should make it attractive to customers worried about cloud data safety. Such customers include the Swiss banking sector, one worth $2 trillion and with a long history of "discrete" services to moneyed foreigners. 

"If you are a provider in a cloud environment you need to apply the highest standards of security you can get," Koening says. "It's like opening a data tunnel from the server to your screen and then displaying the data on your screen. That makes it pretty, pretty difficult for anyone to see what's there."

Being majority-owned by the Swiss government, Swisscom is obliged to store all data in Switzerland, with all financial data and data transfer taking place within the country. 

Switzerland is not the only European country shaken by the extent of NSA spying-- Deutsche Telekom has plans to shield all internet traffic within Germany, and recently Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves demanded for more sovereign clouds in Europe.

"Recent months have proven it again-- it is very important for Europe to create its own data clouds, operating under EU law and completely safe for users," Ilves said. "Right now, 95% of the cloud services used in Europe are provided by US companies. EU data protection legislation also needs to be modernised and we should understand that big private firms are able to gather more information than any state."

Go Swisscom Builds "Swiss Cloud" as Spying Storm Rages (Reuters)