Building a “National Cloud” or a “Government Cloud” is a major strategic endeavour with implications for digital sovereignty, data protection, operational efficiency, and national resilience. Oracle Alloy is a powerful technology platform that can support such an initiative and that allows governments and large organizations to operate their own branded cloud, based on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It provides all the capabilities of OCI – compute, storage, networking, databases, security, AI/ML, analytics, and more – but it is deployed in your data centers with a local control plane.
In the heart of Europe, where neutrality, security, and privacy are mandatory infrastructure principles, your government is uniquely positioned to lead a global shift: from owning cloud infrastructure to renting it.
Disclaimer: This article reflects my opinions and views, not necessarily my employer’s.
From Lethargy to Leadership in Government IT
Let’s be honest. Too much of government IT has become stuck in survival mode.
Across Europe and around the world, some public institutions are weighed down by aging systems, fragmented infrastructure, and long procurement cycles. Innovation is slow, integration is painful, and by the time new technologies are implemented, they are already years behind what is available in the commercial sector.
This isn’t due to a lack of intelligence or intention. It is a product of the traditional government IT operating model: risk-averse, capital-intensive, and structurally disconnected from the pace of global cloud innovation. The result? Public sector agencies spend the bulk of their budgets maintaining legacy environments, not improving services.
Oracle Alloy could offer a clean break from that cycle and not by outsourcing sovereignty to a foreign hyperscaler, but by shifting how innovation enters government infrastructure in the first place.
And the goal isn’t just to modernize infrastructure. It’s to enable a new culture inside government IT. One where agencies experiment faster, share components more easily, and co-develop services that benefit citizens directly.
This is the moment for public sector IT to stop playing catch-up and start leading.
A Cloud You Rent. A Cloud You Don’t Own
The same actions lead to the same results. That is true in life and true in the IT world. Perhaps it is time for something new.
Oracle Alloy is not just another version of a private cloud stack, and it is not just an appliance or limited variant of someone else’s infrastructure. It is the entire Oracle Cloud Infrastructure stack. The same hyperperformant services that power global organizations from different verticals – made available as a complete, sovereign cloud platform, on your soil, under your law.
Since I am based in Switzerland, let’s take Switzerland as a hypothetical example.
From Federal Agencies to Cantons to Hospitals
In Switzerland, the public sector is fragmented across agencies, cantons, municipalities, education and healthcare institutions. Each with their own infrastructure, standards, security models, and legacy systems. The result is duplication of effort, siloed data, different partnerships, different technologies, different contracts, and limited cross-agency innovation.
A national cloud powered by Oracle Alloy could change that. Not by centralizing everything under one inflexible system, but by enabling a federated digital infrastructure with shared standards, shared services, and trusted interoperability.
The key is standardization without centralization. Oracle Alloy would allow each public body to have its own isolated tenant, its own billing, and its own compliance scope, while sharing the same underlying services, including:
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Secure identity federation (SSO, MFA, IAM)
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Confidential data exchange platforms (via object storage, APIs, or data mesh patterns)
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Federated analytics and dashboards
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Common DevOps pipelines and cloud-native tooling
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Unified observability and logging
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Shared AI and machine learning models trained on in-country data
This means that a doctor in a canton hospital could access lab results or insurance data from a federal agency: securely, instantly, and with full auditability. A municipality could reuse an open-source app developed by another canton. A crisis response unit could integrate data from multiple agencies in real time. All without the friction of incompatible systems!
The Swiss national cloud would not just be infrastructure. It would be an enabler of public-sector collaboration, built on trust, scalability, and shared sovereignty. The kind of cloud that reflects Swiss federalism: distributed, resilient, and built for cooperation.
Stop Stretching the Cloud
For years, public sector IT leaders have tried to “stretch” hyperscale cloud into local data centers by deploying limited hybrid extensions like cloud appliances, edge stacks, or modified regions that offer only a fraction of what public cloud delivers. That model is the wrong approach.
Government ITs follow a cloud-smart approach and want to host the right application in the right cloud based on specific reasons and data. Without Oracle Alloy, they would do something like this:
- Continue to run an on-premises virtualization stack with VMware
- Stretch AWS on-premises with AWS Outposts
- Another department would use Azure Local to stretch some Azure services to their local data center
- Use the public regions from AWS and Azure for some workloads
Alloy lets you stop stretching. It lets you collapse public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud into one integrated platform with a single control plane, consistent developer experience, and full-service parity with OCI. All hosted in your data centers. Start operating the cloud!
Sovereign But Not Isolated
One of the myths about sovereign cloud solutions is that they must come at the cost of flexibility, that once a government or public sector organization chooses a national cloud, it locks itself into a single ecosystem. But the reality, especially with Oracle Alloy, is far more nuanced and far more strategic.
Oracle Alloy is a sovereign cloud platform that respects openness. It is designed to coexist, interoperate, and integrate with other cloud providers, open-source technologies, and enterprise platforms, making it the ideal foundation for a forward-looking multi-cloud strategy.
Freedom by Design – Open Source and Flexibility
One of the most pressing concerns when governments consider adopting a cloud platform is vendor lock-in. The fear of being bound to a single commercial stack with proprietary formats, proprietary APIs, and inflexible pricing. Is not theoretical, it is real, and it shapes procurement decisions at every level of the public sector.
With Oracle Alloy, the cloud is not only sovereign but also flexible by design, thanks to deep support for and contributions to open-source software, open standards, and open governance.
At the core of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and thus Alloy, are technologies that reflect a strong commitment to the open-source ecosystem:
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Oracle Linux is the foundation for OCI compute, but fully compatible with Red Hat, CentOS, and upstream Linux
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Kubernetes and container-native technologies are first-class citizens. Alloy supports managed Kubernetes (OKE), Helm, Docker, and service meshes out of the box.
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Open database compatibility is key. While Oracle Database is world-class and widely used in governments and many other global enterprises, Alloy also supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, and other open-source databases through Oracle’s managed services or BYOL (bring your own license) models.
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Terraform, the IaC standard, is natively supported across OCI and Alloy, letting teams automate deployments using vendor-neutral tooling.
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Oracle contributes upstream to projects like Linux, MySQL, KVM, GraalVM, Kafka,Grafana, Helm, ArgoCD, and many more.
What would it mean for Switzerland in this case? This open foundation means Switzerland is never trapped.
Whether you are running containerized microservices for a municipal portal, deploying a PostgreSQL-backed health analytics app in a hospital, or training AI models using open ML frameworks, you are using tools that aren’t locked into Oracle, and can move with you.
A national cloud powered by Alloy could even host, extend, and contribute back to public-sector open-source projects. Imagine cantons co-developing shared services, releasing reusable modules for identity, payments, or civic engagement.
Sovereignty is not just about where your data lives. It is about having the freedom to choose, adapt, and innovate on your own terms.
A Commercial Cloud With a National Purpose
Oracle Alloy is an economic and governance model. As the Alloy operator, you could:
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Customize the branding of the end customer console and alerts
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Define pricing, rate cards, account types, and discount schedules with your end customers
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Define the support structure and service levels for end customers and provide complete billing and lifecycle management
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Do the onboarding and provide centralized support
- Onboard third-party software vendors into a local cloud marketplace
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Offer vertical zones for health, education, defense, justice – each with tailored compliance definitions
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Govern access, identity, encryption, and telemetry end-to-end.
The platform would support multi-tenancy across agencies and sectors, enabling a true “cloud utility” model.
Oracle remains in the background, ensuring global-class infrastructure, high-availability SLAs, offering tier 2 and tier 3 support, access to innovation and the latest technologies, and deep engineering support. But you remain in the driver’s seat.
It gives nations a way to operate full-spectrum cloud services with hyperscale performance, but on local, sovereign terms. Not just for compliance, but for trust. Not just for data, but for the entire value chain of digital services.
The Future Is Federated
We need a model where sovereignty becomes a strategy and not a limitation.
Public sector cloud strategy isn’t about picking a winner. It is about building an architecture of trust, resilience, and choice. Oracle Alloy would enable a future where the national cloud can be the sovereign anchor, while still connecting to and coexisting with the global cloud economy.
Oracle Alloy is sovereign-first, but not cloud-exclusive. It is a platform for governments that want independence without isolation, and interoperability without compromise.
