Russian anti-virus software company Kaspersky Lab will move its data and major processing centre out of Russia to Switzerland by year-end in a bid to win back customers’ trust, the company said on May 15.

Kaspersky Lab has been accused of both knowingly and unwittingly helping the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) spy on foreigners.

The move will see most of the company’s customer data storage and processing activities relocated to Zurich, with an independent third party employed to supervise the process and ensure “full transparency”. Operations concerning threat detection and software assembly will also be relocated, New Economy reports.

Kaspersky also plans to open a ‘transparency centre’ in which stakeholders can examine the source code of the firm’s products, as well as its software updates.

“As a leading global cybersecurity solutions provider, Kaspersky Lab has always been committed to the most trustworthy industry practices, including strong protection for transmitted data, strict internal policies for data access, ongoing security testing of its infrastructure and more,” the company said in a statement.

“With this new set of measures, Kaspersky Lab aims to significantly improve the resilience of its IT infrastructure to any trust risk – even theoretical ones – and to increase its transparency to current and future clients, as well as to the general public.”