COUNTRY FOCUS : SWITZERLAND
How can a local cloud service provider stay relevant and compete with the big hyperscalers ? We talk to Bojan Jovanovic , Flow Swiss Co-founder , about the company ’ s new underground data centre location and its success selling premium cloud services designed for the Swiss market .
Flow offers alternative solutions to the Swiss marke
Panoramic View of Bern , Capital City of Switzerland
Flow Swiss was established in 2009 and is still run by its founders . Flow offers a range of premium as-a-Service ( aaS ) cloud products , including Mac-as-a-Service ( one of the company ’ s first offerings ), Kubernetes and DevOps hosting , compute cloud , object storage and Platform-as-a-Service for scalable , container-based application hosting .
Swiss sovereign cloud
An important part of the Flow Swiss approach is its focus on sovereign cloud . Microsoft and Google have had Swiss locations for a few years and AWS fully entered Switzerland in November 2022 , but the growing trend is for companies to seek cloud services from locally owned companies .
“ In Switzerland the term ‘ sovereign entity ’ is becoming more and more popular and people are beginning to think carefully about the companies they outsource their data to ,” said Bojan Jovanovic , Flow Swiss Co-founder . “ Your data can be encrypted , fine , but if for some political reason , for circumstances outside your control , your provider removes your access to it . . . you ’ re in a bad place .
“ Of course , this isn ’ t the purpose of these big US hyperscalers , they ’ re in business to make their
50 INTELLIGENTCIO EUROPE www . intelligentcio . com