Swiss managed services provider Netcloud has been awarded a 1.4 million CHF ($1.6 million) contract to run a new data center for the municipality of Steffisburg, Switzerland.

According to the original tender, published last year, the local authority is procuring the infrastructure in a “geo-redundant” data center inside the country. Netcloud will, in turn, run the lower levels of the IT stack for the municipality, “up to and including the virtualization layer,” for just under five years. DCD has reached out to both organizations for comment.

A municipality situated south of Bern, Steffisburg provides IT services for “approximately 1,900 users at 24 locations,” including for the local administration and several schools in the area. The tender specifies that while Netcloud will assume responsibility for running the lower levels of the IT stack, local government will still have oversight over virtual machines, virtual hardware, DMZ access rules, and other aspects of the “outsourced layers” of its IT system within the data center.

Netcloud was one of three companies that bid for the contract. Founded in 1998, the firm is a Swiss cloud and managed services provider headquartered in the nearby town of Winterthur. Employing over 300 staff, Netcloud has collaborated with several high-profile international firms in recent years, including Nvidia, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Cisco.

Steffisburg itself only appears to host one other data center, operated by CS&M Computer Support Maintenance, although at least eight more are located in the surrounding Bern area, as reported by DataCenterMap. According to the text of the contract award issued by Steffisburg, anyone who wishes to appeal against its decision must file their objections in duplicate within 20 days to the District Governor’s office in Thun, Switzerland. All evidence cited, it wrote, “must be precisely identified and, where possible, enclosed.”

Learn more about the data center market in Switzerland and the wider DACH region, and meet with other executives and experts at the DCN Zurich event later this year.