Every RAG vendor selling into Switzerland says “Swiss hosted”. Twelve questions are enough to find out whether that is architecture or marketing. Send them verbatim and require written answers; a genuinely sovereign Swiss RAG platform answers all twelve on one page.
Data path and jurisdiction
- Where does inference run? Not storage — inference. The answer must name a country and an operator. “Our cloud region is in Switzerland” does not answer it if the model API is elsewhere.
- Where are embeddings computed, and where do the vectors live? Embedding APIs are the most frequently overlooked cross-border transfer in a RAG stack.
- Is every sub-processor in the data path incorporated outside US jurisdiction? Ask for the list, with company names and countries. A short list is a good sign.
- Where do backups and logs live, and for how long? Backups are copies of your corpus; a Swiss primary with a foreign backup region defeats the exercise.
Encryption and access
- Can the operator technically read customer content? The honest answers are yes or no, not “we don't”. Ask when the encryption is applied — before storage, or by the storage provider — and who holds the key.
- Is encryption per customer or platform-wide? One key for all tenants means one compromise for all tenants.
- Is access control enforced at retrieval time, per document? If ACLs are applied only in the UI, a well-phrased question can still pull restricted content into an answer.
- Do answers cite their sources? Without passage-level citations you cannot audit an answer, and you cannot detect when the model has drifted from the evidence.
Compliance and exit
- Does deletion cascade? Deleting a document must remove its chunks, vectors and knowledge-graph entries — otherwise the nFADP deletion right is unenforceable. Ask them to demonstrate it.
- What is in the audit log, and can you export it? Regulated reviews need who asked what, over which documents, when.
- What happens at contract end? Export format, deletion certificate, deadline. Get it in the contract, not the sales deck.
- Can it be deployed single-tenant if the regulator asks? A vendor with a dedicated-infrastructure option has thought about regulated customers; one without will be renegotiating architecture mid-audit.
How to score the answers
Written answers to all twelve, with named countries and named operators, indicate a platform designed for sovereignty. Verbal reassurance on questions 1–4, or a refusal to enumerate sub-processors, means the data path has segments the vendor would rather not detail — which is itself the answer. Questions 5–8 are where “encrypted at rest” claims usually collapse into “encrypted by our cloud provider, who holds the keys”.
SovraRAG publishes its answers to all twelve: Swiss AI cloud for inference and embeddings, Geneva datacenter for compute and object storage, backups in the same Swiss bucket, per-tenant AES-256-GCM applied before storage, ACLs enforced in the retrieval layer, cascading deletion, full audit and query logs, and a dedicated single-tenant tier. Ask us for the one-pager or start with the Swiss RAG overview.
This article is general information, not legal advice.