Swisscom builds 'Swiss Cloud' as spying storm rages
Swisscom builds 'Swiss Cloud' as spying storm rages
Reuters – 10 hours ago
By Caroline Copley
ZURICH (Reuters) - 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.
"Data protection and privacy is a long tradition in
Switzerland, and that's why it's pretty difficult to get to something,"
Koenig said.
"But 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."
Unlike in the United States, where the 2001 Patriot Act
and the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISAA) gives U.S.
intelligence agencies the power to carry out mass information gathering,
Swisscom would have to receive a formal request from a prosecutor before
allowing access to data.
Yet while Swiss privacy laws will govern data stored
locally in Switzerland, Swisscom says it is hard to guarantee the security of
data that crosses borders, such as information exchanged by employees working
in different countries.
Concern over the extent of foreign intelligence access to
data has unnerved many countries, including Germany, where state-backed
Deutsche Telekom wants communications firms to collaborate to shield local
internet traffic.
INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY
Swisscom, which is majority-owned by the Swiss
government, wants to be at the forefront of new technology to monitor and
detect illegal threats, such as hacking.
"If you are a provider in a cloud environment you
need to apply the highest standards of security you can get," said Koenig,
adding the company was implementing new ways to look at intrusion and data
threats.
He said improvements in technology such as HTML 5, a new
programming language for websites that can support apps on many different platforms,
would make it harder to retrieve data.
"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."
In Switzerland, which upholds privacy and data secrecy
for its citizens and has long profited from providing discreet banking services
to foreigners, the NSA surveillance furor is particularly sensitive.
The Swiss government is worried about surveillance of
Switzerland's more than $2 trillion financial centre and is seeking measures to
ensure against spying, Basler Zeitung reported last week, citing sources.
Swisscom is subject to regulation requiring it to store
all client data in Switzerland. The company counts banks among its biggest
clients, and the country's financial regulator FINMA also stipulates that data
and data transfer must happen within Switzerland.
For now, the company is focusing on its Swiss-based
clients but says it would have the capacity to support demand from foreign
companies seeking a privacy haven.
Koenig declined to disclose how much Swisscom was
investing in its cloud nor how much it
was planning to charge potential clients for the service,
but said it would be competitive with other providers such as Amazon Web
Services and International Business Machines.
He said Swisscom's goal was to have 70 percent of its own
IT infrastructure in the cloud by 2016, the equivalent of 200-300 petabytes of
data. According to analysts at Deloitte Analytics, it would take 223,000 DVDs
to hold just one petabyte.
(Additional reporting by Katharina Bart; Editing by Will
Waterman)
Comments
Post a Comment