The Switzerland-based telco Swisscom is in the process of building a national “Swiss Cloud” – but denies claims that the primary motivation is around acquiring customers spooked by the NSA scandal.

The story first broke on Reuters, with the news agency reporting that the move is “driven more by a desire to cut costs and make its systems more dynamic”, according to Swisscom head of IT services Andreas Koenig.

Yet there’s a link to perceived security threats – given Switzerland’s stricter privacy laws, Koenig argues it would make sense for companies to store data there.  

Swisscom would need a formal request from a prosecutor before giving access to stored data, and as Nick Farrell, writing for Fudzilla, notes, the system as it stands would be “useless to the spooks”.

A small clue to this news came in the form of a whitepaper Swisscom published last month, which revealed that, in …