PRISM security fears boost Swiss data center growth
Artmotion, Switzerland’s biggest offshore hosting company, has leased an additional 1500m2 of hosting space to double its capacity. It has a data center in Zurich that is backed up by a second underground facility, both using servers from HP.
The stringent laws which govern Swiss banks are derivative of the nation’s approach to privacy, and now the country is fast becoming the ideal location for storing data too, says Mateo Meier, director at Artmotion. “Unlike the US or the rest of Europe, Switzerland offers many data security benefits," he said. "For instance, as the country is not a member of the EU, the only way to gain access to the data hosted within a Swiss Datacenter is if the company receives an official court order proving guilt or liability. This procedure applies to all countries requesting any information from a Swiss data center and unlike in the EU there is no special law for the US.”
Recent leaks of the American National Security Agency’s (NSA) PRISM surveillance programme have sparked growing concern over data privacy, with implications for global corporations using US-controlled cloud services such as AWS and Azure, he says. The private hosting companies in Switzerland are seeing huge growth as the country is outside of the EU so it is not bound by pan-European agreements to share data with other member states, or worse, the US. As a result Artmotion has seen a 45 per cent growth in revenue amid this new demand for heightened privacy, says Meier.
Following the PRISM revelations, there have been concerns about the safety of employees using file sharing software like Dropbox and online office resources such as Office 365, which are hosted in the US and the EU, he adds.
www.artmotion.eu
