ELCA delivers scalable sovereign cloud on Red Hat OpenShift

ELCA needed a more reliable platform to meet growing customer demands for digital sovereignty in highly regulated sectors. The national Justitia 4.0 justice digitization project required a large-scale, enterprise-grade infrastructure, designed with enhanced security features to span across 3 data centers in Switzerland. To address these needs, ELCA implemented a managed cloud environment built on Red Hat OpenShift. The platform has reduced deployment times from weeks to hours, minimized costs through multitenancy, and increased control with built-in governance and automation. With Red Hat OpenShift, ELCA continues to deliver sovereign cloud solutions that support compliance and scalability, and foster long-term customer trust.

Benefits: 

• Addressed digital sovereignty requirements for Justitia 4.0
• Reduced deployment times from a week to hours
• Strengthened control and governance

ELCA is an independent Swiss cloud and IT service provider that supports customers across highly regulated sectors, including finance, healthcare, and government. Following a 20% growth last year, the company remains focused on developing long-term partnerships with its customers and delivering scalable digital services.

In today’s geopolitical and regulatory landscape, ELCA’s customers are increasingly seeking IT solutions that provide stability, control, and a strategic focus on security. In Switzerland, there is a growing demand for digital sovereignty, so organizations can control where data is stored, how it is accessed and used, and which technologies are deployed.

For some ELCA customers, these requirements are not optional but mandated by law. For example, regulations from the State Secretariat for Security Policy (SEPOS) affect both data residency and data governance, dictating that sensitive data must often remain within Swiss borders and be managed under Swiss jurisdiction. This extends to who can access the data and whether they hold the necessary security clearance.

ELCA’s customers are looking for more than just compliance, however. They also want greater accountability with a reliable, local, and transparent partner. “Increasingly, our customers want assurance that their digital infrastructure not only meets the highest requirements of security and compliance but is also run by people they can trust and reach,” said Daniel Meienberg, Vice President, Cloud and Managed Service, ELCA cloud services.

ELCA offers managed cloud services tailored for regulated industries. However, as demand increased, the company’s use of OKD—an open source community-based solution—was no longer enough to offer the enterprise-level support and stability required. ELCA needed a more reliable, enterprise-grade solution to support essential services and maintain trust.

To meet the digital sovereignty needs of its customers in regulated industries, ELCA launched a fully managed cloud environment built on Red Hat OpenShift. With the company’s extensive experience with OKD, the migration was straightforward, with the team working briefly with Red Hat to validate the architecture.

ELCA selected Red Hat OpenShift for its stability and local support. “Red Hat OpenShift’s built-in tools are designed to manage, upgrade, and back up, which helps us safeguard service levels,” said Sébastien Gremion, Lead Expert, ELCA cloud services. “The platform also offers reliable local support and good self-service capabilities, so we can troubleshoot issues efficiently.”

Red Hat OpenShift is now ELCA’s standard platform for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and hosting services, supporting development, pre-production, and production across 3 key environments, the first of which is being a dedicated cloud to support Justitia 4.0, a nationwide initiative to digitize Switzerland’s justice system.

Justitia 4.0 involves replacing paper documents with digital files within judicial authorities, introducing electronic communication between parties, and supporting online consultations of judicial files. To support this major project, ELCA provides a Swiss sovereign cloud tailored to the justice sector’s unique compliance needs.

“The environment features Swiss-based infrastructure and operations, full data sovereignty, dedicated hardware, and high availability,” said Gremion. “Now in its pilot phase, the platform will eventually serve up to 25,000 users, including lawyers and court officials, and is expected to become legally mandated in 2026.”

In addition to Justitia’s platform, ELCA uses Red Hat OpenShift to support its shared sovereign cloud for customers requiring high levels of data control, reliability, and compliance. The platform is hosted within ELCA’s 8 Swiss-based datacenters, with racks and internet connectivity managed by the company. As part of the service, ELCA provides a direct point of contact for end-to-end support.

Red Hat OpenShift also underpins ELCA’s software factory, which develops and hosts a wide range of customer-facing and backend applications across industries such as banking, insurance, and healthcare. The platform supports around 30 DevOps/SysOps users and hundreds of developers across various customer projects.

Addressed digital sovereignty requirements for Justitia 4.0

By building a dedicated managed cloud service on Red Hat OpenShift, ELCA can provide a flexible and compliant platform tailored to the needs of Justitia 4.0. The solution meets the highest standards for data resilience, availability, and legal compliance, all within Swiss borders.

Resilience and operational stability remain top priorities, supported by Red Hat OpenShift’s built-in protections and additional security layers implemented by ELCA. “This highly complex project was delivered on time and within budget—and it continues to run with exceptional stability,” said Jacques Bühler, Project Manager, Justitia.swiss.

Reduced deployment times from a week to hours

By standardizing on Red Hat OpenShift, ELCA has streamlined containerization, development pipelines, and deployment processes across its environments. The platform’s multitenancy model reduces infrastructure complexity and cost, as fewer clusters are needed to support multiple workloads.

This multitenancy setup also accelerates deployment. New environments can be provisioned in just hours, thanks to automated configuration for backup, monitoring, and security. “We can automatically provision a fully configured environment, including backup and monitoring, in just a few hours, compared to a week previously,” said Gremion.

Increased control and governance

With Red Hat OpenShift, ELCA has greater control over both the infrastructure and application layers. Containerization provides oversight of the environments in which applications run, while Infrastructure as Code strengthens security-focused and compliance policies that must be built in from the start.

Working with Red Hat OpenShift also increases auditability, accountability, and transparency to make it easier for ELCA to work with third parties and customers, while addressing regulatory requirements. “Red Hat OpenShift provides us with a solid foundation for delivering digital services where stability, resilience, and digital sovereignty are important,” said Meienberg.

With Red Hat OpenShift, ELCA has the standardized toolsets and processes to maximize agility, resilience, and operational efficiency that are essential for delivering modern SaaS solutions at scale. The platform also plays a key role in meeting rising customer demands for digital sovereignty, especially in highly regulated sectors. “Red Hat OpenShift gives us the flexibility and control we need to deliver sovereign cloud services that our customers can trust,” said Meienberg.

ELCA is currently exploring Red Hat OpenShift AI to accelerate the development and deployment of large language models (LLMs) for customer use cases. The team is also evaluating Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to consolidate workloads and further enhance operational efficiency within its sovereign cloud environment.