Data location
Your data, your call
You always know what runs where. And you can move at any time, even away from us.
Where mailboxes, files and the website live is on the minds of many Swiss businesses right now, and it's a fair question. What's usually missing is an answer without a sales agenda. Here is ours.
Why the question is coming up now
Almost everything a business works with every day now lives in the cloud: email, files, website, accounting, AI tools. That's convenient and often the right choice. What the last few years have made clearer is that each of these services has a provider behind it, and that provider follows the laws of its own country.
Under US law, the so-called CLOUD Act, American providers are obliged to give US authorities access to data, including data held in their European data centres. For most business data this has no everyday consequences, and it's no reason to panic. But it is a good reason to choose your location deliberately.
What a location does and doesn't guarantee
A data centre in Switzerland guarantees where data is stored. Who may access it depends on the law the provider answers to.
With an American service, "Swiss data residency" means the data sits here while the access rights stay American. For many purposes that is fine, as long as you know it before you rely on it.
That's why, for us, Europe means European providers, not just European servers. For every piece of your setup, we tell you what the chosen location actually delivers.
Three tiers to choose from
There is no single right answer, but there are three tiers, each with its place. And you choose piece by piece: mail, file storage, website and AI can each be well placed somewhere different.
US
US services, set up properly
When the tool is clearly the best choice
Microsoft 365 is the backbone of email, calendar and files for most businesses, and there's nothing wrong with that: staying is fine. What matters is taking the setup seriously - activating Swiss data residency where available, keeping access and backups tidy, and knowing what those settings do and don't deliver. For ordinary business data, that's a good place to be. AI can run this way too, for example through Microsoft Azure in a Swiss data centre.
For example: Microsoft 365 with Swiss data residency
Europe
European providers
The middle path that is often enough
For hosting, file storage and many tools there are European providers under European law, technically mature and fairly priced. And a move doesn't have to cover everything: mail stays where it works, the file storage relocates. That partial migration is the realistic path.
For example: Hetzner, Nextcloud, IONOS, Scaleway
Switzerland
Swiss providers
Where law, clients or your own instinct call for it
Swiss providers with their own data centres cover almost everything today, from mail and file storage to cloud infrastructure. It's rarely the cheapest tier, but it's the one with the shortest distance and Swiss law from end to end.
For example: Infomaniak, Exoscale, Hostpoint, cyon, Proton
Full disclosure: what we use ourselves
Anyone advising on data location has to answer the question for their own house. Here is our answer, with no sugar-coating.
This website runs on Vercel, a US service. For a site like ours it's the best choice: fast to deliver, and it stores no client data. The code is ours and built so it could move tomorrow. Our mailboxes and files live in Microsoft 365. The content of this site is managed with Sanity, a Norwegian company. Our own software runs on Supabase, a US company where the storage region is selectable. AI solutions we build with US providers by default; where a case calls for it, we run them through a Swiss data centre.
That's the point: we're not dogmatic, we're loyal to your data. Our needs are not yours. If your data calls for a different place, we choose a different place - and you get the same honest account of your setup as you just read about ours.
Watch the AI filter work, liveThe concrete steps
The data location check
The first step is a one-off inventory: we map out where everything of yours lives and which law applies there. After a few hours of work, you have a written overview and a clear path.
The ground rule behind it
Choosing the location is one of our ground rules of working together: you decide, your choice goes into the engagement in writing, and you can move at any time.
See the ground rule on the working-together pageNot sure where to even start? That's what the first conversation is for. You get our assessment, and nobody will try to talk you into a move.