- Switzerland’s Army chief Thomas Süssli wants to stop the introduction of Microsoft Office 365 in the army
- Confidential data should not be stored in the US cloud, so the software is hardly usable and too expensive
- He is calling for a separate, secure and private, Open Source-based IT solution - the Federal Chancellery is sticking with the Microsoft project for the time being
- The background to Süssli’s warning is also the US “Cloud Act”, which allows American authorities access to data - even if it is located in data centers outside the USA
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He [Süssli] is therefore calling for an exit strategy from the Microsoft cloud and the development of a private or open source-based solution. This is the only way for the army to retain full control over its data.
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Any network connected software from an American company has been too risky since at least the days of the Patriot Act, double so since the Cloud Act.
The same thing applies to software from British companies, for similar reasons (differently named legislation but same kind of objective and similar systemic structures for the same kind of surveillance of other countries and industrial espionage, which ARE used in practice, as shown when the GCHQ was caught using the systems of Belgacomm to evesdrop on EU politicians and by a lot of what came out in the Snowden Revelations).
So Windows itself is a massive security risk for any non-American state operations (not just Military but for example most of the Justice System and anybody dealing with personal information that can be used to blackmail important people) as well as any company which competes with a large US based company.