Russia is facing a cloud storage crisis following the exodus of major Western cloud service providers, including Google and Microsoft. According to Kommersant, this situation leaves the country with a margin of two months to take action before their data centers run out of space and the “critical systems” of federal and regional authorities begin to cause problems.
Due to the imposed sanctions, Russian private companies were forced to turn to local cloud storage providers. For example, the storage needs of the telephone operator MegaFon have increased fivefold and those of the social network VK have grown by 20% in recent weeks. As this trend grows, Russian data centers are getting closer to reaching their limits.
According to the aforementioned Russian media, the problem is of such importance to the government that, through the Ministry of Digital Transformation, it called a meeting with representatives of the national technology companies Sberbank, MTS, Oxygen, Rostelecom, Atom-Data, Croc and Yandex to find a solution that will help meet the state’s growing demand for IT storage.
Russia thirsty for storage
A great consumer of space is the Russian state itself, a devourer of Terabytes. For example, video surveillance and facial recognition systems are becoming more prevalent, requiring more and more cloud storage. In Moscow alone there are 200,000 cameras operating 24 hours a day. A crisis like the one that is emerging right now could affect the operation of this and other systems considered critical by the government.
The Russian authorities are considering three proposals to solve the problem. one goes through buy all storage reserved for businesses and consumers. The decision would cause problems in other spheres and businesses. Non-essential services, such as video and music streaming or personal file storage, may be limited.
On the table there is also a much more drastic measure. Is about expropriate the IT infrastructure that Western cloud storage companies left behind in the country. The idea would be to integrate them into the public infrastructure, although the legal procedure to achieve this is not detailed. We know that the country is considering confiscating and nationalizing several companies.
Finally, the government considers buy equipment to reinforce the data centers that are under the orbit of the state. However, this is one of the more complicated alternatives. Due to the sanctions, prices have skyrocketed and many companies no longer sell hardware to Russia, including the Asian giant Huawei, which has suspended all its operations with the country until March 26.
Image | Yandex
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism