Switch Cloud Forward Forum Day 2026 Recap

Sovereign cloud, real-world use cases, and a room full of Swiss higher education decision-makers

On June 23rd, VSHN was at the Cloud Forward Forum Day 2026 in Bern – an event organized by Switch for IT leaders, procurement specialists, and strategists from Swiss universities and research institutions. The topic: how to make public cloud work for Swiss higher education, without sacrificing sovereignty, compliance, or flexibility.

VSHN showed up twice – once with a use case from the health sector, and once on stage with a short elevator pitch. Here’s what the day looked like.

The bigger picture: AI, sovereignty, and the pressure to modernize

The day opened with a keynote from Marc Stampfli (NVIDIA), framing the current moment as an industrial revolution driven by intelligence – and raising the question of what sovereignty means when AI infrastructure is concentrated in a handful of global providers. It set the tone for everything that followed: institutions want to move fast, but not at the cost of control over their data.

Elevator pitches: fast takes, sharp angles

The mid-morning elevator pitch session gave a handful of speakers three minutes each to make their case. VSHN CEO Aarno Aukia took the stage with a single, sharp argument: sovereignty is no longer a philosophy – it’s a procurement criterion with a price tag attached.

His reference point was a EUR 180M cloud contract awarded by the EU Commission in April 2026, scored across eight sovereignty dimensions – supply chain (20%), strategic (15%), operational (15%), and technology (15%) among the highest-weighted. The real-world consequence: the Thales/Google joint venture cost Proximus a full SEAL level compared to pure-European competitors. Sovereignty now translates directly into contract wins and losses.

VSHN self-scores at SEAL-3 – the same level as the EU’s three strongest winners in that procurement. For an audience of Swiss higher education decision-makers thinking about cloud vendor selection, the message landed at exactly the right moment.

HIN: sovereign cloud for health data, built on Exoscale and VSHN

The morning use case session that resonated most with VSHN’s work came from Mohammad Alavi of Health Info Net (HIN). HIN is one of Switzerland’s largest providers in the health sector, and Mohammad walked the audience through a challenge many institutions share: how do you build a modern, scalable cloud platform for sensitive data when regulations are incomplete and the stakes are high?

HIN’s answer was to fill the regulatory gap themselves – setting their own principles for security and data privacy, then building a sovereign cloud platform together with Swiss partners Exoscale and VSHN. The result is a platform that not only hosts HIN’s own services securely, but also enables HIN community members to run their own applications on the same infrastructure.

It’s a strong example of what platform engineering can unlock in regulated industries: not just compliance, but genuine capability for others to build on top. Read the full story in our HIN success story.

Other use cases from the day

The afternoon sessions rounded out the picture with a range of perspectives. AWS, Sparkle, and Netcloud explored privacy and compliance as enablers of sovereignty. SoftwareOne made the case for Google Workspace as a practical complement to Microsoft 365 in higher education environments. And the Switch Cloud session featured an experience report from FHNW and Swiss Learning Hub on deploying Evento – a campus management system used by many Swiss universities of applied sciences – into the Switch Cloud, including the stumbling blocks and early-adopter lessons that came with it.

Bechtle also presented an AI-powered data access project from the Universitäre Altersmedizin FELIX PLATTER in Basel, where Azure OpenAI Services and Microsoft Fabric are being used to let researchers query clinical data using natural language – an example of how AI is finding its way into very practical, regulated workflows.

What we took away

Cloud Forward is a focused event – not a big trade show, but a room where Swiss higher education institutions compare notes on real decisions. The recurring theme across sessions was that sovereignty isn’t just a compliance checkbox: it’s a design principle that shapes architecture, partner selection, and long-term flexibility.

That’s exactly the kind of platform thinking VSHN brings to customers like HIN – and the conversation we want to keep having with Swiss institutions navigating the same challenges.

Curious how a sovereign, Kubernetes-based cloud platform could work for your organization? Let’s talk.