Almost everyone uses Microsoft’s Word, Excel, Teams and Outlook – including the Swiss federal administration. But relying so heavily on a single American company is now seen as a risk to Switzerland’s control over its own data, and the government has decided to test whether it can manage without.

Experts point to three worries: sensitive data could be reached by foreign governments, an administration needs guaranteed access to its own files, and licence fees keep climbing. The proposed fix is open-source software – programmes whose code is public and that belong to no tech giant.

The trial will start small, covering about 7% of federal staff, with priority given to those handling the most sensitive material. The idea is to test the alternatives first, then decide whether Switzerland can eventually leave the Microsoft ecosystem altogether. It’s not far-fetched: in Germany, the state of Schleswig-Holstein has already made the switch, and four in five of its workstations now run without Microsoft.

source: https://www.rts.ch/