Russia is facing an IT crisis. The country is in danger of running out of data storage capacity as Western cloud providers withdraw one by one.
The Russian government is reportedly investigating several solutions to solve an impending IT storage problem. That problem was caused by the disappearance of Western suppliers and cloud providers. For example, consideration is being given to leasing all available domestic data storage. And if that doesn’t sound drastic enough, an avenue is also being considered to confiscate abandoned IT resources from companies that have pulled out of the country.
These proposals were discussed at a meeting at the Russian Ministry of Digital Transformation, attended by Sberbank, MTS, Oxygen, Rostelecom, Atom-Data, Croc, and Yandex representatives.
At least, that is what the usually well-informed Bleepingcomputer writes based on an article by the Russian media company Kommersant. According to the article, all parties involved estimate that the country has about two months left before the available storage space is exhausted, a claim that Data News cannot immediately verify.
Due to the boycott of Western cloud providers, more and more Russian companies are forced to use domestic data storage. For example, the Russian mobile provider MegaFon is said to have increased its local storage capacity fivefold. MTS speaks of a tenfold increase, and VK – say the Russian Facebook clone – had to look for 20% extra storage space in a week.
The existing Russian data centres cannot handle those additional local data needs. Moreover, according to Kommersant, the data need is even more acute because the Russian government services now also need extra capacity for ‘smart city’ projects with video surveillance and facial recognition.