assalve/E+/Getty ImagesZDNET’s key takeaways
- Two Swiss government groups are moving from Microsoft 365 to openDesk.
- The Swiss Federal Chancellery and Swiss Armed Forces are moving at different paces.
- It’s mostly about protecting Swiss data from American snoopers.
Switzerland’s federal government is moving to create an open-source, digitally sovereign workplace for thousands of employees, while the Swiss Armed Forces’ Cyber Command is moving much faster to replace Microsoft 365, especially for sensitive work.
They’re joining numerous other European government agencies, such as those in Austria, France, Germany, and Ireland, that are also cutting out Microsoft 365 and Windows in favor of open-source office suites and Linux.
After a feasibility study, the Swiss Federal Chancellery concluded that an open-source browser-based office suite could handle core administrative functions. So, it has started deploying an independently operated office-and-collaboration platform that will run in parallel with Microsoft 365. By the end of 2027, the government expects the platform to serve about 3,000 of its 47,000 employees involved in critical business processes across federal departments.
The proposed platform, openDesk, a German-developed open-source workplace platform, covers email, calendars, documents, presentations, telephony, and audio and video conferencing. Besides Switzerland, Germany, and the International Criminal Court have adopted openDesk.
The Swiss government is positioning the project as an exercise in digital sovereignty and crisis resilience rather than an immediate, universal replacement for Microsoft 365. The Federal Chancellery said the independent platform should provide a meaningful fallback for central processes, including if Microsoft 365 becomes unavailable
Switzerland estimates the initial program will cost about 9 million Swiss francs. The funding comes from parliamentary appropriations for a sovereign Swiss open-source platform for office automation. The first phase is intended to build the platform and establish a basis for estimating the cost of a potential broader rollout and ongoing operations.
The government cautioned that technical feasibility is only the beginning. The transition will require substantial customization, security, and platform assessments, and additional in-house expertise. A particularly difficult issue is the number of applications and specialized systems closely tied to Microsoft’s architecture.
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For now, the Swiss government has not decided to replace its entire federal desktop environment. The government will decide whether to adopt the program across the entire government after its initial rollout.
Military charges toward open-source software
Meanwhile, the Swiss Armed Forces’ Cyber Command and its Cyber and Electromagnetic Actions unit are pursuing a much more aggressive timetable.
By October, all employees of these units are to be equipped with the open-source alternative openDesk at their workplace. Why the hurry? As Swiss technology journalist, Adrienne Fichter put it, “Anyone who still needs reasons to break free from dependence on American Big Tech companies: The US government reliably provides them.“
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She continued, “All US tech companies are kept on a short leash by the current administration: They must hand over data at Washington’s behest, they must shut down services at Trump’s command.”
In short, they don’t trust American cloud companies. So, they’re migrating to openDesk, after concluding that Microsoft 365’s cloud-centered model is incompatible with military requirements for confidentiality, availability, and integrity.
So the Swiss Cyber Command’s specialists are moving to openDesk “in record time.” The goal is to reduce exposure to foreign legal and technical dependencies as fast as possible.
Reporting on the plan says the military is particularly concerned that data held by US technology companies could be subject to US government access under the CLOUD Act. This act enables American law enforcement agencies to force US-based technology companies to disclose electronic data regardless of whether that data is stored inside or outside the United States. For a military organization that works with highly sensitive and potentially classified information, that’s completely unacceptable.
European sovereignty push
OpenDesk is part of a broader European effort to give public authorities an alternative to hyperscaler-hosted productivity suites. Rather than being a single monolithic clone of Microsoft 365, it combines open-source office, communications, collaboration, and file-management components behind a common user environment and identity layer.
Switzerland’s approach illustrates a distinction becoming increasingly important in European public-sector IT: open source is being treated not only as a software-development model, but as a means of preserving operational autonomy and achieving digital sovereignty.
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A government may still use commercial and cloud-hosted services, but it wants an independently controllable option for essential work. This is especially true for operations that cannot tolerate an external supplier, foreign jurisdiction, or cloud outage becoming a single point of failure.
The result is not yet a federal declaration that Microsoft is out. It is a two-speed transition: a careful, 3,000-user civilian program designed to test a sovereign alternative beside Microsoft 365, and a far faster military move by cyber specialists who regard that alternative as necessary for high-security work. The pattern, however, is already clear. Countries worldwide, not just the EU, are moving from proprietary American-based services to open European-based services.
