Cloud sovereignty comes with trade-offs – Swisscom CEO

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(Source: Tereza Krásová/Light Reading)

Sovereignty has come to the fore in European telecom and tech in recent years, as the continent's geopolitical environment gets increasingly turbulent. Many European telcos have been working to establish themselves as providers of sovereign solutions, while also working with hyperscalers. During this week's Network X conference in Vienna, Swisscom CEO Christoph Aeschlimann argued this is something of a balancing act.

Asked about the tension between putting workloads in sovereign cloud and its work with AWS, he noted that each approach has its benefits and trade-offs.

"If you operate it yourself with much more control, it might be also more trusted. But it also comes with other downsides – limited investment, limited innovation speed, limited service catalogue," he argued.

The company has partnered with AWS for a long time, having chosen it as a preferred partner for its enterprise IT in 2021, and the companies worked together on a proof-of-concept exploring hybrid cloud use cases, including 5G core applications.

Swisscom has also launched a Kubernetes-based service for companies seeking more control over their data with Kubermatic. It is aimed at companies with strict data protection and regulatory environments.

"It is obvious that we cannot compete on an innovation and service catalogue dimension with AWS," Aeschlimann added, arguing it's impossible on "regular cloud" because of how much capex hyperscalers have.

"We have maybe access to things we cannot build ourselves...and there we trade off certain control elements or risk elements, and then we go with AWS, and I think most of the big enterprises on the planet, if you look at them, they all have hybrid strategies. Nobody likes [to go] for a full public cloud or full on-prem anymore."

Many European telcos have been offering sovereign cloud solutions, including Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Orange and BT. However, Vodafone, for example, still relies on hyperscaler – AWS in its case – infrastructure based in Europe for sovereign cloud services.

In many ways, it is a logical step, as Marina Koytcheva, research director at STL Partners, recently remarked during a webinar. As "national champions" and highly regulated digital players offering critical infrastructure, they tend to be highly trusted, she argued.

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