The Switzerland-based telco Swisscom is in the process of building a national “Swiss Cloud” – but denies claims that the primary motivation is around acquiring customers spooked by the NSA scandal.

The story first broke on Reuters, with the news agency reporting that the move is “driven more by a desire to cut costs and make its systems more dynamic”, according to Swisscom head of IT services Andreas Koenig.

Yet there’s a link to perceived security threats – given Switzerland’s stricter privacy laws, Koenig argues it would make sense for companies to store data there.  

Swisscom would need a formal request from a prosecutor before giving access to stored data, and as Nick Farrell, writing for Fudzilla, notes, the system as it stands would be “useless to the spooks”.

A small clue to this news came in the form of a whitepaper Swisscom published last month, which revealed that, in a survey of over 1300 business and IT decision makers, the second most important business priority at the IT level was to improve and guarantee data security – behind improving IT performance.

Even if the Swiss telco won’t admit it directly, there are plenty out there who are saying that the NSA scare is bad news for the US cloud industry.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) published a survey in July which revealed how more than half (56%) of those polled said they were less likely to use US-based providers, whilst a report from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), citing the CSA study, predicted that the US cloud computing industry would lose up to $35bn in the next three years.

The report noted how Artmotion, another Swiss CSP, posted improved revenue figures to the tune of 45% in the month immediately after the scandal broke.

Even though it’s not possible to prove whether that was entirely related to NSA either way, Swisscom will hope to get a similar spike.

The vendor, which is majority-owned by the Swiss government, has suffered a difficult passage, not least due to the sudden death of CEO Carsten Schotler in July. Speaking to Reuters, Koenig said that the company had invested a “competitive” amount in the cloud compared with Amazon and IBM.

What’s your opinion on the news? Will Swisscom get a good uptake, and where does the company’s cloud ambition go from here?