Proton has extended Easy Switch for Business, its guided migration tool, to Microsoft 365. Organisations can now move email, calendars and contacts from Outlook or Google Workspace to Proton’s end-to-end encrypted platform without taking their teams offline.
The tool first launched for Google Workspace in June. Adding Microsoft 365 opens it up to the platform that underpins most corporate email in the UK and Europe, at a time when security teams are treating dependence on US providers as a risk to be managed rather than a given.
Migration without a cutover weekend
According to Proton, fear of data loss, broken inboxes and downtime is what keeps most companies on their existing provider longer than they would like. Easy Switch is designed to remove that barrier.
Administrators choose what to bring across, connect Proton to their Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace tenant, set up their domain, select the accounts to migrate, onboard staff and then retire the old platform. During the transition, the existing provider and Proton stay in sync through a dual-send period, so employees keep working normally and IT teams can test the new environment before committing to a full switch.
Proton says many customers begin by running its platform in parallel as a business continuity fallback, one that keeps running through an outage, ransomware attack or geopolitical disruption. It is also how most of the CISOs it works with start testing a migration.
“Businesses shouldn’t have to choose between productivity and control over their own data. Every week we hear from IT leaders who thought switching email providers would take months of disruption. Easy Switch for Business proves that’s no longer true. Whether the driver is compliance, resilience, or simply wanting a provider that isn’t vulnerable to foreign government pressure, moving off Google or Microsoft is now a matter of days, not months,” said Raphael Auphan, COO at Proton.
Encryption and jurisdiction
Once migrated, data is protected by end-to-end and zero-access encryption by default, meaning Proton itself cannot read customers’ emails, contacts or calendar entries and cannot hand them over or leak them in a breach. Proton’s code is open source and independently audited, so security teams can verify how the encryption works.
Proton is headquartered in Switzerland, outside US jurisdiction, so surveillance laws such as FISA Section 702 and the CLOUD Act, which give US authorities legal routes to data held by American providers, do not apply. The company is also owned and governed by the nonprofit Proton Foundation, which it says protects customers from an acquisition that could move their data into the ecosystem or jurisdiction they were trying to leave.
For email sent outside Proton, messages are protected in transit with TLS and encrypted on Proton’s servers, though the recipient’s provider can still access its copy. Users can send password-protected emails to keep external messages end-to-end encrypted regardless of the recipient’s provider.
Kill switch concerns
The launch follows Proton research in which 74% of European business leaders said they were worried a US technology provider could cut off their access through a ‘kill switch’, roughly the same proportion that feared ransomware or cyberattacks. The survey of 1,500 business leaders across the UK, Germany and France also found that only around a third had a continuity solution in place for email.
US sanctions have already been used to restrict technology access for international bodies, including the International Criminal Court. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s decision to switch on Copilot ‘flex routing’ by default for EU and EFTA customers, allowing AI processing to take place outside the EU during periods of peak demand unless administrators opt out, has raised questions about how firm Big Tech’s sovereignty commitments really are.
More than 100,000 organisations, including newsrooms, law firms, NGOs and government agencies, now use Proton. Proton Mail sits within a wider encrypted suite that includes calendar, drive, docs, sheets, video conferencing, a password manager and VPN.
Further details on Easy Switch for Business are available here.
