Russian businesses reserve foreign data centre capacities following drone strikes

Russian companies have begun reserving capacities in foreign data processing centres following drone strikes on Russian data centres.

Source: The Moscow Times, an independent Amsterdam-based news outlet

Details: Demand among Russian companies for foreign capacities in data processing centres (DPCs) has grown significantly after large data centres within the country came under drone attack in October.

Yevgeny Svidersky, Vice President for Cloud Services at ITGlobal.com, told the Russian newspaper Kommersant that businesses are interested in sites in Kazakhstan and elsewhere.

Other sources confirmed that several Russian companies have begun the migration process.

"Data centre accidents" have ceased to be a hypothetical risk, the companies explained. They are "reviewing their approach to business continuity organisation" and looking for backup sites that are independent of the main data centre's network and energy infrastructure.

Ukrainian forces targeted data centres operated by Russian tech giant Yandex and other companies in October, The Moscow Times reported. Key facilities came under attack in six oblasts in European Russia – Vladimir, Kaluga, Leningrad, Nizhny Novgorod, Ryazan and Saratov.

Yandex has now said its engineers have restored access to 97.16% of customer data on Yandex Cloud after the attacks on its data centres. It said the remaining 2.84% is unrecoverable because equipment was severely damaged and customers had no backups of the affected data on the platform.

Yandex said customers previously had to enable backups manually. Backups are now enabled by default for new virtual machines.

The company's website says Yandex is spreading its computing resources across new sites in several Russian regions.

Background:

• In October, drones attacked Sasovo in Russia's Ryazan Oblast, which caused a fire to break out at the Sasta plant, where the Yandex DC LLC data centre is located.
• The Yandex press service reported that the data centre in Sasovo had completely suspended its operations following a drone attack in the morning.
• On 9 October, Yandex reported a new attack on a data centre, this time in Kaluga.
• On 11 October, the Russian company announced the suspension of operations at a data centre in Vladimir due to a drone attack.
• Russian leader Vladimir Putin signed a decree obliging Russian owners of non-state data centres to reserve 10% of their capacities to ensure the uninterrupted operation of Russia's IT infrastructure.

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