The context
CID ERP is a publisher and integrator of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software based in Swiss Romande, with a client base mostly made of Swiss SMEs in distribution, manufacturing and services. The very nature of the business places a hard requirement on data location: an ERP hosts a company's most sensitive commercial, financial and logistical information, and that data cannot be hosted outside Swiss jurisdiction without raising serious compliance (nFADP), legal continuity and client-perception issues. Historically, the CID ERP SaaS infrastructure ran on Amazon Web Services in the Ireland region, a technically valid choice that nevertheless created two combined problems: a sovereignty issue (European data under American Cloud Act) and an economic one (USD-denominated cloud bill, growing with usage, hard to forecast).
The technical challenge
By the time the decision to migrate was made, the CID ERP infrastructure on AWS comprised about thirty application services, several PostgreSQL databases in RDS, an application load balancer, a CloudWatch-based monitoring system, and several terabytes of business data. The migration complexity rested on three combined factors. First, service continuity: ERP clients use the platform during business hours and any significant interruption is contractually unacceptable. Second, data consistency: PostgreSQL databases had to be migrated with no loss and no inconsistency, within a controlled time window. Finally, total cost: the migration operation itself had to fit inside what the client would save over 12 to 18 months of cloud bill, otherwise the ROI calculation would not hold.
The Hidora solution
The target architecture is built entirely on Hikube, Hidora's Swiss sovereign cloud, operated from Geneva on Swiss datacenters. Concretely, we redeployed the full CID ERP application portfolio on a managed Hikube Kubernetes cluster, migrated the PostgreSQL databases through an asynchronous replication strategy followed by a coordinated cutover during a short maintenance window (under 30 minutes of total downtime), refitted the observability stack with Prometheus + Grafana + Loki, and placed Cloudflare in front for DNS resolution and DDoS protection. The migration took 3 months with a disciplined approach: a pilot service to validate the full chain, then a progressive service-by-service migration with functional validation at every step, and finally the critical database cutover coordinated with CID ERP teams. At no point was the old AWS infrastructure shut down before full validation of the new one.
The measured results
Three months after migration completion, business and technical indicators converge on the project's success. The monthly cloud bill has been divided by 5 compared to the previous AWS platform, primarily thanks to the absence of egress fees on Hikube (a major cost line on AWS for a B2B SaaS) and to more accurate instance sizing. That saving represents a significant annual gain that more than funds the operational cost of the new platform. Application performance measured on the user side (p95 latency, load times of the most-used ERP screens) improved by around 30%, mostly because CID ERP users are geographically in Switzerland and the cloud infrastructure is now itself in Switzerland, with network latency under 10 ms versus 30 to 50 ms toward AWS Ireland. And data sovereignty is now complete: 100% of client data stays on Swiss territory, operated by a Swiss team, which makes nFADP compliance demonstrable during client audits and provides a differentiating commercial argument against the competition.
The transferable lesson
The CID ERP case demonstrates concretely that Swiss sovereignty is not at odds with economic efficiency, contrary to a persistent received idea. Hyperscalers have long benefited from a perception of low cost that crumbles as soon as you look at the real line items: egress, support, multi-zone replication, premium managed services. For a B2B SaaS with a geographically concentrated Swiss client base, the arithmetic now leans clearly toward a local cloud infrastructure. Migrating from a hyperscaler to a Swiss sovereign cloud takes a few months without noticeable service interruption, with a payback period typically under 18 months on the hosting line alone, plus an additional commercial benefit in terms of market differentiation.