Swiss made Software + Swiss made Hosting

cloudtec develops online platforms with a team in Bern and operates them in Switzerland. The ‘swiss made software’ and ‘swiss hosting’ labels turn this statement into something verifiable: both are tied to conditions, and using them improperly is a criminal offence.

What ‘swiss made software’ requires

Three conditions must be met for a product to carry the label:

• The Swiss share of the manufacturing costs is at least 60%.
• The most important manufacturing process took place in Switzerland.
• The company has its registered office in Switzerland and is entered in the commercial register.

Manufacturing costs include research and development, materials and production including quality assurance and certification; for software, this essentially means the salaries of the professional staff. Back office, management, accounting and marketing do not count. Articles 48 to 48d of the Trade Mark Protection Act are decisive.

With us, development happens in our own team in Bern: more than 20 staff, no outsourced development teams and no passing work on to third parties.

What ‘swiss hosting’ requires

‘swiss hosting’ is a legal promise, not a technical one. It says nothing about the quality of the technical safeguards, but two things about the data: it stays in Switzerland, and third parties can only access it through Swiss authorities. The conditions:

• The registered office and actual management of the licensee are in Switzerland (Art. 49 para. 1 TmPA).
• Applications, personal data and non-personal data are held in a data centre in Switzerland; data protection and data security are subject to Swiss law.
• With ‘software as a service’, the hosting provider must also meet these requirements and confirm this in writing.
• Access to the environment or data from abroad must be protected so that neither a foreign organisation nor a foreign government can view or demand data.
• For mixed offerings, the logo may only be used for the parts that fully meet the criteria.

Foreign hosting providers and cloud providers are not permitted in combination with ‘swiss hosting’. That does not affect us: we run our servers as virtual machines in a Swiss Virtual Data Center and control the infrastructure from the network to the container: no shared hosting, no dependence on hyperscalers.

Why this is more than a logo

Data location in Switzerland is often sold as a security promise without anyone checking the legal situation. An international provider with a site in Switzerland can guarantee that the data is held here, but not that only Swiss authorities have access. The US CLOUD Act permits access to data of companies subject to American law, regardless of where it is stored.

The two labels say nothing about the quality of a single line of code. They say where it was written and under which law the data is held. Both can be verified, and that is exactly the point.