Now that’s what I call secure! Swiss hosters go underground

Technical security is one thing, secure data centre entry systems and armed guards with dogs might be another. But if you really want to sleep soundly at night knowing your data is safe and sound you need to lodge an image like this in your head.

It’s a mountain lair belonging to Swiss cloud hosting specialist, Exoscaleand is its latest data storage facility due to be unveiled next month. The infrastructure is “housed deep below the Swiss Alps in a disused military bunker,” near Zurich, says Exoscale, and it offers the “highest level of physical security, together with sophisticated technical security (24/7 CCTV monitoring, physical alarms systems and biometric access control).”

When the cold war was at its coldest the neutral Swiss decided that their best defense was to dig into their granite mountains and ride out any nuclear exchange. Presumably there are quite a few of these dotted around Switzerland now, just waiting to be redeveloped.

The company is on a marketing drive and says it intends to slash prices by up to a third to create one of the most competitive offerings in Europe.  An entry-level instance offering 512MB RAM and 10GB SSD persistent disk storage is available for $6 a month, while 32GB RAM and 400GB disk storage comes in at under $300 a month it claims.

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