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The Swiss Army wants to prevent data from being transferred to the United States.
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The Army's cyber specialists are phasing out Microsoft 365—faster than the rest of the federal government. There is more to this decision than just a desire to save money.
It’s supposed to happen by October. Starting then, the Swiss Army’s Cyber Command will no longer use Word, Outlook, and Teams, but instead “Open Desk,” an open-source office suite from Germany. What sounds like a dry IT procurement decision is, in reality, a signal with explosive implications. After all, if the very unit responsible for protecting the army from cyberattacks no longer trusts the world’s largest software company, that should give quite a few others pause for thought.
The story was uncovered by the online magazine “Republik,” which broke the news of the change and whose investigation has since been picked up by media outlets across Europe. The Federal Chancellery has confirmed the schedule.
The impetus came, of all people, from Thomas Süssli, who was the chief of the armed forces at the time. In a letter that *Die Republik* made public in October 2025, he demanded that the Federal Chancellery provide an alternative to Microsoft’s tools. What made this particularly ironic was that the very same Federal Chancellery had signed a contract worth millions with the U.S. corporation just two years earlier.
The underlying problem is easy to explain. Although the federal government has been working with Microsoft for decades, until now the data has remained in the administration’s own data centers. Now Microsoft is forcing its customers into the cloud. In the future, emails, documents, calendars, and video conferences will be required to run through the company’s servers. A document that a civil servant creates in Word could thus theoretically fall into the hands of the company—and, via the U.S. Cloud Act, ultimately into those of the U.S. government.
For an army whose information is largely classified as “top secret,” that is simply not an option. “Microsoft 365 is a very good solution,” Simon Müller, head of the Cyber Command, told Republik. However, he added that it is unsuitable for an army with the highest standards of confidentiality. The military’s greatest concern is a potential “call home” function—that is, the risk that data could be leaked unnoticed to foreign security agencies.
Thomas Süssli was the driving force behind the move away from Microsoft.
Keystone
Recent history shows that these concerns are not paranoid. Following the imposition of sanctions, the U.S. government had the Microsoft accounts of judges at the International Criminal Court deactivated and restricted access to certain AI models. Anyone who wants to can digitally paralyze entire organizations at the push of a button. That is the uncomfortable lesson for Europe.
Consequently, there is great concern about the so-called “kill switch”—the off switch from overseas. An army must remain operational in any situation, especially during a crisis. But that is precisely when dependence on a U.S. corporation would be most dangerous. There is also a more mundane reason: Microsoft and Amazon have drastically raised the prices of their cloud licenses in recent years. The army wants to escape this cost trap as well.
Just how serious the military is about this was already evident in the case of the U.S. data company Palantir. While its analytics software impressed the Army Staff’s evaluators with its performance, because the code is classified and cannot be inspected, they were unable to verify whether any backdoors had been built in. The recommendation therefore clearly favored an open-source solution.
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The alternative now comes from Germany. Open Desk was developed by the Center for Digital Sovereignty, which was once funded by the German government. The suite includes word processing, email, a calendar, and video conferencing—in other words, everything a government agency needs for day-to-day collaboration. Because the source code is open, anyone can check what the software is doing behind the scenes.
However, the solution is not perfect. The City of Zurich concluded in its own study that a switch is not realistic for its administration at this time. Open Desk currently runs only in a browser, lacks a telephony solution like the one in Teams, and the migration costs are difficult to quantify. For the IT professionals at the Cyber Command, these shortcomings are less of a concern. They operate their critical systems in their own data centers anyway and can replace missing components themselves.
The military’s move is part of a European trend. Following the freezing of its judges’ accounts, the International Criminal Court plans to switch to Open Desk; the Austrian Armed Forces are also turning to a Microsoft alternative; and France is even considering a complete switch to Linux. Digitalization is increasingly being used as a geopolitical weapon.
Of course, the initiative isn’t getting off scot-free. Rumors are circulating within federal circles that the Department of Defense is also motivated by cost-cutting and a desire to divert attention from past IT glitches. And indeed, a contradiction remains. While the cyber unit insists on digital sovereignty, Switzerland continues to rely on the U.S. for its most important defense project, the F-35 jets.
For the rest of the federal government, October is still a date to mark on the calendar. If the transition at Cyber Command is successful, it will dispel the skeptics’ main argument—that things simply can’t work without Microsoft. The more intriguing question will then no longer be whether the government will follow suit, but when.
14.07.2026, 14:00
16.07.2026, 09:00
