The evolution of Switzerland as a Safe Hosting Haven
We have become so accustomed to gloomy news this past year that any headline containing the word ‘happiest’ is bound to grab attention. One such Timeout headline caught our eye this week: Switzerland has just been ranked the third happiest country in the world.
A quick click through reveals that last Friday 19 March saw the release of the Annual World Happiness Report for 2021, by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, powered by data from the Gallup World Poll and Lloyd’s Register Foundation. Set against the backdrop of the global pandemic, the report’s authors faced the unique challenge of trying to understand what effect Covid has had on subjective well-being and vice versa.
The report ranked Finland at the top of the list with Denmark and Switzerland in second and third respectively.
Without wishing to gloss over the achievements of the good peoples of Finland and Denmark, we must declare an interest in being rather chuffed at Switzerland’s position on the list. The reason? We have a Tier 3 Data Centre facility in Zurich.
Switzerland is famous for many things – its stunning scenery, the Red Cross, Dadaism, Chocolate, watch making – but it has until recently managed to keep its reputation as an emerging tech destination as quiet as one of its peerless timekeepers. And yet, when you step back and evaluate the benefits of Switzerland, you wonder why it has taken this long for the country to promote itself as a hosting ‘safe haven’ for the storage of both digital and physical data, for both internal and international companies and individuals, basing its evolution on a data-driven economy.
Firstly, Switzerland is a safe country, politically stable, and economically independent. Secondly, it understands the need for privacy and protecting data, indeed it is commonly believed that Switzerland maintains the world’s most robust privacy laws, as evidenced by its banking system (data stored on Swiss soil is safeguarded by the Swiss Federal Data Protection Act and Ordinance to the Swiss FDPA).
When you factor in its physical geographical location – in the heart of Europe – guaranteeing low latency and excellent data connections to all key European cities, it’s not hard to understand why the US Tech Giants are falling over themselves to offer their services in-country.
Over the past 12 months, and in response to customer demand, Microsoft has increased its Azure cloud computing service offerings in Switzerland to include: API Management, App Gateway v2, Bastion, Batch, Container Registry, Dedicated HSM, DevTest Labs, HDInsight, Media Services, Power BI Embedded and Private Link.
And AWS, never slow to let an opportunity pass it by, has recently announced its plans to open a new AWS Region in Switzerland in the second half of 2022. When the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region is launched -joining existing regions in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Sweden & UK – organisations will be able to run their applications and serve end users across the region from data centers located in Switzerland.
Now, far be it for us to blow our own trumpet, or state that we ‘told you so’ but we’ve known about Switzerland’s potential as a hosting location for years.
Our tier three facility, which is LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum pre-certified, is situated close to Zurich airport for ease of access. We offer a full range of storage, colocation and cloud services, all connected by Fast Tier 1 BGP bandwidth with connection to SwissIX. We can even manage your Azure services that Microsoft have been so keen to recently promote, creating the perfect hybrid cloud environment.
So, if you’re searching for Happy Hosting in an officially designated Happy Country, please get in touch.
Image © Eberhard Grossgasteiger
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