News

Reason and procedure

Keeping Infrastructure-as-a-Service ("IaaS") simple has always been one of our stated aims at cloudscale.ch: an account has an email address and a password, some credit, and as many or as few virtual servers as required at the time. This is not, however, always ideal for a company using our services and some users would also like to group their cloud resources, e.g. according to the purpose of individual servers. In future, our new cloud control panel will address all scenarios optimally:

• The customer "account" will remain the same as with the current approach, but with additional options, e.g. the ability to separate cloud resources into different projects. This will allow, for example, the clean separation of test and production environments.
• The new "organizations" will be subject to a separate framework agreement and will also be able to book cloud resources; however, instead of a password for logging in, these will have one or several "members" who may have different roles and rights within the organization.

If you would like to find out more about the new options, please make sure you have subscribed to our newsletter or keep an eye on the news section on our website.

The new cloud control panel will go live in the second quarter of 2021. To ensure transparent regulation of the new technical options, we are already publishing our updated ToS, which cover these changes. These new ToS will apply with immediate effect to newly created customer accounts. For existing customers, the new ToS come into effect on 2021-04-26 after a transition period of 30 days in accordance with the current regulations. We will not be invoking the provision about changes to ToS being authorized with immediate effect upon booking additional services and this provision will then be deleted without replacement in the new ToS. This means that an automated cloud setup will not affect the lead time available to you.

There is no need for you to do anything. Any existing services will continue unchanged, also after the new ToS come into effect.

The most important changes

With accounts and organizations, the new ToS explicitly cover both options for a customer relationship and thus of a framework agreement. A customer "account", which is required to log into our cloud control panel, is the typical approach for an individual who would like to use cloudscale.ch services. Once logged in, "organizations" can be created to conclude additional framework agreements, registered in the name of one's company, for example.

The "Introduction" and "Use" sections of the new ToS define which agreement and thus whose responsibility individual actions, e.g. creating a new server, come under. In all cases, the account or organization within the scope of which an action is performed is relevant. As a result, the new option of granting authorization is based on the principles known from e.g. work contracts and proxy assignments.

As cooperation is possible, accounts are no longer always completely independent from each other. The "Transmission of customer data" section now states that when authorization is accepted or granted, certain data may be or become visible to other people, e.g. in the logs of an organization you are a member of.

To make it clear that the person reading the ToS is not necessarily being addressed personally, we have changed the wording from "you" to "customer". Please bear in mind that the English translation of the ToS is provided for the convenience of our non-German-speaking customers, and only the German version is legally binding.

In addition to a few minor changes, we have also been able to meet another customer demand. Already in the past, we announced maintenance work in advance wherever possible and now we have included a corresponding section ("Maintenance work") in our ToS. In the interest of our customers, we nonetheless continue to reserve the right to carry out maintenance work at short notice in urgent cases, e.g. security updates.

Most things will stay the same

The basic principle behind our ToS remains unchanged. We want to be a close and approachable partner for you even in the "small print". This starts with the data location, and we will continue to operate our whole infrastructure exclusively in data centers in Switzerland. We provide individual support for technical issues. Our services and their prices will not change with the new ToS. And because we are convinced that our "overall package" speaks for itself, you still do not need to observe any minimum contractual periods or notice periods at cloudscale.ch.

We look forward to introducing our completely updated cloud control panel to you soon and are convinced that, with the updated ToS, we have laid a balanced foundation for the new options. However, should you have any concerns, please contact us directly so we can discuss your questions.

Full flexibility with full transparency,
Your cloudscale.ch team