- Switzerland’s Army chief Thomas Süssli wants to stop the introduction of Microsoft Office 365 in the army
- Confidential data should not be stored in the US cloud, so the software is hardly usable and too expensive
- He is calling for a separate, secure and private, Open Source-based IT solution - the Federal Chancellery is sticking with the Microsoft project for the time being
- The background to Süssli’s warning is also the US “Cloud Act”, which allows American authorities access to data - even if it is located in data centers outside the USA
…
He [Süssli] is therefore calling for an exit strategy from the Microsoft cloud and the development of a private or open source-based solution. This is the only way for the army to retain full control over its data.
…
This is old news, since Süssli has left his position in 2025. However, his opinion is true and luckily, the Cyber Command already decided to ditch M365 and use Open Source.
My problem with this whole topic is, that M365 has been evaluated since 2020. So every security officer, including CISO, who approved M365, should be thrown out.
It’s crazy to me that these people have faced next to no repercussions for so long that they don’t even try to do their job well. You would think that out of anyone militaries would attempt to secure their communications. (Or maybe thats the facade they put forward and just kill you if they catch you breaching data?).
How is using a datacenter in a different countries even legal for such purposes? Why wouldn’t they run on-prem servers with redundancy across their own country? Fuckin’ mental.
“Because we talked with Microsoft and they guaranteed that no data will leave the data center at location X” 🤡
To be fair, reality is actually worse than that, since M$ has already said under oath during a trial in France that it is unable to protect the data of EU customers from the prying eyes of Gringoland’s authorities. Switzerland is not EU, but of course the same applies.