Switzerland Drops Microsoft 365 for Free Software: Digital Sovereignty Is No Longer an Experiment

A few days ago we wrote here about how China was accelerating its exit from Windows, citing national security reasons. Now it is Switzerland that takes a step that is hard to ignore: the federal government has launched a pilot to replace Microsoft 365 on 3,000 workstations (7% of its administrative workforce) with a budget of 9 million Swiss francs and the goal of completing the migration in 2027. If the pilot works, the figure could scale up to 54,000 workstations across the entire federal administration. We are no longer talking about a symbolic gesture, but a plan with a date, a budget and a law behind it.

What lies behind the Swiss pilot

Bern is working in parallel: the new environment coexists for now with Microsoft 365 while the results are evaluated. The first tests, with a couple of hundred civil servants, show positive feedback on document processing and email, although limitations remain in large-scale videoconferencing. The legal framework already existed: the EMBAG Act, in force since 2024, requires the Swiss administration to prioritize open-source software and to publish the code it funds with public money. Continuing to pay for Microsoft 365 licenses did not fit that rule, and now it is time to correct it.

Cloud Act, licenses and data protection: the underlying reasons

Matthias Stürmer, professor at the Bern University of Applied Sciences, sums up the argument in one idea: data protection weighs more than savings. The US Cloud Act of 2018 requires US companies to hand over data hosted on their servers, wherever they are, if a court in their country demands it. For a government managing sensitive information about its citizens, that is a permanent legal risk, not a technical hypothesis. On top of that comes the most prosaic argument of all: license prices keep rising year after year.

Switzerland is not an isolated case

France has been migrating workstations from Windows to Linux distributions for years. Germany is pushing openDesk, its own open-source collaboration alternative, with an eye on becoming independent from the big US tech companies. Denmark, Estonia and Austria are cited as countries walking the same path, each at its own pace. The pattern is clear: when a European government seriously considers its digital sovereignty, the conversation is no longer just about Linux on the desktop, but about who controls the email, documents and video calls of its entire administration.

Risk, not ideology

It is tempting to read all this as an anti-Microsoft crusade, but the real argument is risk management. No serious government wants its operational continuity, or the confidentiality of its data, to depend on a decision made in a court on another continent, or on a price hike it cannot negotiate. That applies just as much to a ministry as to a small business that hosts its invoicing in the cloud of a third party that, when the time comes, will not care much about what happens to its data.

And Spain, when?

Meanwhile, the Spanish public administration continues to rely almost entirely on Microsoft and Google for its day-to-day work, with no public plan comparable to the Swiss, French or German ones. No budget, no date, no law pushing in that direction. How long will it take Spain to seek its own technological sovereignty, as its neighbors already do? Or is it that, as long as the threat doesn’t knock on our door, we keep refusing to see it coming? We read you in the comments.