Swisscom picks new CEO as it looks to NSA-defeating cloud future
Swisscom has appointed Urs Schaeppi as its new CEO.
Schaeppi took up the role of interim CEO earlier this year following the death of the company's previous chief executive, Carsten Schloter.
Swisscom also announced the merger of its corporate business and IT services units into a single division from next year, with enterprise customers being an increasing area of focus for the telco in the future.
Schaeppi said in a statement that the company sees "opportunities for growth in cloud solutions and related markets such as home networking and e-health".
"In the case of cloud-based services in particular, the security and storage of data in Switzerland is becoming an ever more important factor in business customers' decision-making processes," Swisscom said.
The statement is likely an allusion to ongoing data security concerns among European businesses resulting from the NSA spying scandal.
Swisscom's head of IT services Andreas Koenig said recently that the company was working on its own cloud services platform as a way of allowing Swiss clients to keep their data within the country's borders. However, the cloud platform could later be extended to foreign businesses to help safeguard data privacy, he told Reuters.
The telco declined to give more details on the service when asked by ZDNet, but said it would be available to corporate and private customers from next year.
The need for European companies to ensure their data is not subject to the attentions of foreign intelligence services has been something of a theme for telcos of late.
Last month, Germany's incumbent telco Deutsche Telekom announced plans to keep domestic internet traffic within the country, while Estonia's president has called for more sovereign clouds in Europe.