Swiss Cloud Adoption Drives Local Data Center Expansion

Enterprises are building hybrid clouds to modernize IT and business processes, favoring local facilities for compliance, ISG Provider Lens report says

Enterprises in Switzerland are increasing their use of IT and business process outsourcing, and they pay close attention to data center location when choosing service providers, according to a new research report published by Information Services Group, a leading global technology research and advisory firm.

“Swiss companies often favor local facilities that offer strong data protection and energy efficiency.”

The 2022 ISG Provider Lens™ Next-Gen Private/Hybrid Cloud — Data Center Services & Solutions report for Switzerland finds Swiss enterprises are contributing to the steep rise in outsourcing services in many European countries, including the U.K., France, Germany and Austria. The top services that companies are seeking include application development and maintenance (ADM) and infrastructure services, ISG says.

Due to a strong focus on compliance, Swiss enterprises tend to favor service providers that operate in local data centers with a high level of certification, the report says. Cloud data center capacity in Switzerland is growing but still in short supply.

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“Data centers in Switzerland are in great demand, especially for cloud services,” said Anna Medkouri, EMEA partner at ISG. “Swiss companies often favor local facilities that offer strong data protection and energy efficiency.”

Swiss companies take a pragmatic approach to the cloud, the report says. Public clouds are the main focus for most IT departments due to innovative application-level opportunities in AI, machine learning and IoT, but IT teams also value easy integration with existing legacy systems. Most cloud implementations boil down to a hybrid or multi-cloud approach.

Cloud data centers are expected to represent a majority of data center capacity in Switzerland by 2025, driving expansion of digital networks in the country, ISG says. For example, peak traffic on the SwissIX network node in Zürich, which connects about 230 customers, reached 840 Gbit/s in 2021 and continues to rise. The trend in Switzerland is toward large data centers of more than 1 megawatt, as developing smaller centers is no longer profitable, the report says.

This growth has led to data centers accounting for approximately 3.6 percent of electricity consumption in Switzerland, ISG says. To minimize carbon footprints, operators are investing in modern cooling methods and hardware interoperability to increase the power density of data center space.

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The report also examines other trends in colocation, managed hosting and managed services, including increasing automation, growing need for low-latency services and evolving needs of midmarket enterprises.

The 2022 ISG Provider Lens™ Next-Gen Private/Hybrid Cloud — Data Center Services & Solutions report for Switzerland evaluates the capabilities of 81 providers across five quadrants: Managed Services for Large Accounts, Managed Services for Midmarket, Managed Hosting for Large Accounts, Managed Hosting for Midmarket and Colocation Services.

The report names Swisscom as a Leader in all five quadrants. It names EveryWare as a Leader in three quadrants. Atos, Aveniq (Avectris), Bechtle, ELCA, Kyndryl, MTF, ti&m and T-Systems are named as Leaders in two quadrants each. Accenture, Axians, BitHawk, Equinix, Green, Interxion (Digital Realty), Netcloud, NTS Workspace, NTT Global Data Centers, Safe Host, Trivadis (Accenture) and UMB are named as Leaders in one quadrant each.

In addition, hosttech is named as a Rising Star — a company with a “promising portfolio” and “high future potential” by ISG’s definition — in one quadrant.