Swisscom picked AWS as the preferred partner for its enterprise IT back in 2021, and its CEO sees no reason to abandon that bet despite Europe's rush toward cloud sovereignty. Speaking at this week's Network X conference in Vienna, Christoph Aeschlimann argued that sovereignty is a balancing act, not a destination, and that operators should apply it selectively rather than wholesale.

"If you operate it yourself with much more control, it might be also more trusted. But it also comes with other downsides – limited investment, limited innovation speed, limited service catalogue," Aeschlimann said during a panel discussion.

Why sovereignty and hyperscalers coexist at Swisscom

The Swiss operator's position is pragmatic. It runs a long-standing AWS partnership, sealed when the US hyperscaler became its preferred enterprise IT partner in 2021. The two companies have since worked together on a proof-of-concept covering hybrid cloud use cases, including 5G core applications.

At the same time, Swisscom sells a Kubernetes-based service built with Kubermatic, aimed at companies operating under strict data protection and regulatory regimes. That product serves customers who need tighter control over where and how their data is handled.

The logic, according to Aeschlimann, is that no single approach wins. "It is obvious that we cannot compete on an innovation and service catalogue dimension with AWS," he said, pointing to the sheer scale of hyperscaler capital expenditure that makes matching them on "regular cloud" impossible.

What does the hybrid strategy look like in practice?

For workloads where Swisscom cannot build the capability itself, the trade-off calculus favours AWS. "We have maybe access to things we cannot build ourselves...and there we trade off certain control elements or risk elements, and then we go with AWS," Aeschlimann explained.

He noted that the pattern is hardly unique to telcos. "I think most of the big enterprises on the planet, if you look at them, they all have hybrid strategies. Nobody likes [to go] for a full public cloud or full on-prem anymore."

That reading matches the broader European market. Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Orange and BT all market sovereign cloud offerings. Yet even Vodafone, one of the loudest voices on digital sovereignty, still relies on AWS infrastructure based in Europe to deliver its sovereign cloud services.

Is sovereignty still a business telcos can win?

Marina Koytcheva, research director at STL Partners, recently suggested during a webinar that operators are credible players here. As "national champions" and highly regulated providers of critical digital infrastructure, they tend to be highly trusted, she argued.

That trust is the asset European telcos are monetising as geopolitical turbulence pushes governments and enterprises to reconsider where their data lives. Swisscom's answer is to sell sovereignty where regulation demands it, through tools like the Kubermatic-based Kubernetes service, while keeping AWS in the stack for everything else.

The tension Aeschlimann described will sharpen as sovereign cloud procurement grows across Europe, and operators will have to keep deciding, workload by workload, how much control they are willing to trade for hyperscaler innovation.