Brief info

We are well prepared when it comes to incident and crisis scenarios. This is because SWITCH operates three critical national infrastructures:

1. The official .ch registry
2. The SWITCHlan university network
3. The Computer Emergency Response Team SWITCH-CERT for IT security incidents

SWITCH also operates other critical services for universities, including the university single sign-on solution SWITCHaai/SWITCH edu-ID. We participate in the relevant risk analyses and are involved in national crisis management.

We guarantee the secure and stable operation of critical infrastructures, as well as other important basic infrastructures for universities. We are following the development of the pandemic in Switzerland on an ongoing basis and implementing further measures where necessary.

As for any on-site work that may become necessary, we have prepared for scenarios that are possible right now.

• Browser  Firefox reduces the quality for all participants. Therefore, we recommended using Google Chrome. If this doesn’t work, we recommend Opera.
• VPN  Turned off
• Audio  Anyone who is not speaking should switch their microphone off.
• Video  In groups of more than 10 people, it’s best to switch your video off.
• Headset  The built-in microphone of your mobile device will pick up sounds from your surroundings, such as traffic or construction site noise. The microphone in your headset, by contrast, will usually only transmit your voice.

You can find the status of all of our services on our monitoring page.

Yes, data transfer within the SWITCHlan university network is running smoothly. 

Many university employees are currently working from home. This means that network traffic leaves SWITCHlan on its way to their houses and reaches them via the commercial internet. Bottlenecks can therefore occur despite the spare capacity in the university network.

Nonetheless, we have increased the Swisscom connection by an additional 10 gigabits per second and expanded our connection to the major Swiss exchange point SwissIX to 100 gigabits per second.

We were able to provide some universities and hospitals with an upgrade to their SWITCHlan connection on 17 March, enabling everyone to work or study from their homes.

Most of us are working from home. All SWITCH’s services can be operated from home via a high-redundancy remote working infrastructure.

SWITCH has set up an internal coronavirus task force that meets every day by virtual means to discuss the current situation, coordinate measures and keep all employees up to date.

Due to the current situation, the list below shows SWITCH events from April through June 2020 only.