How dependent is your company on Microsoft — and how much power does that give the US over you?

In May 2025 the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague lost access to his e-mail account. No attack, no outage. The United States had placed him under sanctions, and his mailbox was with Microsoft. Microsoft denies having blocked the account. The court drew its conclusion anyway and has since been moving to an open-source office suite from Germany.

If that can happen to a court of law: how dependent is your company on Microsoft, and how much power does that give the United States over you?

More than the invoice shows. The power has three levers.

What does the Microsoft 365 subscription cost since the July 2026 price increase?

Since 1 July 2026 Microsoft 365 Business Standard costs 14 instead of 12.50 dollars per person and month, twelve percent more. The smallest business licence rises by around 17 percent. Announced in December, effective at your next renewal. You ordered nothing, you pay anyway.

The licence cost is only the visible part. Price, terms, end of product and the switch to subscription are decided by the corporation alone. You accept the change or you leave. And you cannot leave, because mailbox, calendar, files and accounting all hang on it.

What is the CLOUD Act, and does it apply in Switzerland?

Since 2018 the US CLOUD Act allows US authorities to demand data from US providers regardless of the country in which the data is stored. A data centre in Zurich changes nothing as long as the provider is American. The Swiss Federal Data Protection Commissioner named exactly this access as an open risk when the federal administration introduced Microsoft 365.

Can Microsoft switch off your mailbox?

The Hague case shows the third lever. The provider can switch you off, not because you did something wrong, but because its government demands it. Sanctions, export rules, a dispute between governments: the switch is not in your hands.

Switzerland vs. Microsoft 365: the federal government builds the emergency exit

The federal government has done the sums. Federal and cantonal authorities spent more than a billion francs on Microsoft licences in ten years. Since September 2026 the Federal Chancellery has been building a digitally sovereign workplace for around 3,000 staff: mail, calendar, documents, telephony and video conferencing on open-source software, running alongside Microsoft 365, ready by the end of 2027, first phase around nine million francs.

Not as an overnight replacement. As an emergency exit that is open before anyone needs it.

Is there an alternative to Microsoft 365 for business?

That is the question many people are typing into search engines right now, often with “free” or “Switzerland” added. The honest answer: the alternative to Microsoft 365 is not a product. It is an emergency exit you build while you do not need it. It has two parts.

Part one: the workplace. Mail, calendar, files and documents exist as European alternatives to US software, open source and operated in Switzerland: an Exchange alternative without a US cloud, plus file storage and office programs. The federal administration relies on exactly such building blocks for its emergency exit and is publicly testing with 172 people that it is good enough for everyday work. That is the easy part.

Part two, and it counts for more: the software that makes your business. Order processing, case files, industry forms, reporting. This is where the corporation is strongest, because its suite was built for every industry on every continent: a thousand features, you need twenty, and the twenty never quite fit.

This is exactly where your opportunity lies. What used to speak against software of your own, too expensive, too risky, too few features, no longer holds today. Why, and which three contract lines protect you along the way, is the Sunday edition of 15 November.

Why does digital sovereignty matter for SMEs? What you gain

The point is not the saving. The point is that the three levers are back in your hands. You negotiate the price, because you could leave. Your data sits with a provider no foreign law reaches. And nobody outside your company holds the switch.

Digital sovereignty does not mean building everything yourself. It means you know where your data is, who holds the code and how you get out again. Sovereignty is a dial, not a switch, and an emergency exit turns it a good way in your direction.

How we do it

We work this way, on both sides of the table. Immotron, a real-estate platform, we built for a customer: with an interface for every function, so that his data and his workflows belong to him and not to the tool. Our own AI back office runs on open building blocks nobody can switch off on us, and it came together in three months, with one person and his agents.

The first step

Three things for tomorrow:

1. Work out what you have been paying extra since July, and what the licence costs over five years. You should know that number before the corporation changes it next time.
2. Use the federal government’s emergency exit as a template. Mail, calendar, files, documents: which of them could you run on open-source software tomorrow, in parallel, without switching anything off?
3. Write the list of the software that makes your business. That is part two of the emergency exit, and it is what Sunday is about.

The court in The Hague built its emergency exit after the incident. You can build yours before.