Additional credits for DDPS data centers

The head of the DDPS, Viola Amherd, has instructed the army and Armasuisse to learn lessons from a report by an independent auditing firm. In November, the Federal Councillor commissioned the auditing firm BDO AG to conduct an investigation. Assignedto be able to evaluate whether more additional credits are needed for airspace surveillance and data centers. An additional financial requirement was located and the fact was attributed to three causes:

1. According to the DDPS, the delays in the DDPS data centers project led to delays in the projects for replacing the Florako command and control systems. These delays were due to asynchronous project and time schedules as well as insufficient or overestimated personnel resources at the Command Support Base and the Cyber Command project. The necessary personnel resources are still being secured with external services.
2. Furthermore, the technical, requirement-related dependencies in project and risk management were underestimated and not sufficiently coordinated. The higher demands on the network are primarily in the areas of data transmission rates, real-time data processing and encryption. In addition, there are additional costs for the expansion of the DDPS data centers.
3. Since those responsible for the project had assumed in the original planning regarding the replacement of the command and control systems that the IT services (personnel project provision for the integration and migration to the data center) would be borne entirely by the budget of the command and control support base, there was, according to the DDPS, no financial leeway to cover these ultimately external costs via the project.

Concrete measures for future projects are now to be developed and implemented. These are expected to be available and communicated from spring 2023.

Source: DDPS, BDO