At the end of 2023, the cloud services market grew by 33.9%

At the end of 2023, the cloud services market grew by 33.9%, to RUB 121.4 billion. Most of the revenue came from the rental of computing power, on which clients can run their own IT solutions. Due to the growing demand for cloud services, including from the government, market participants are talking about expanding capacity and building new data centers. In 2024, the development of services may slow down the growth of prices: it can be provoked by sanctions imposed against data centers and market consolidation. Experts say that although equipment supplies will not stop completely, their costs will increase.

Kommersant got acquainted with the iKS-Consulting study on the state of the cloud infrastructure services market in 2023: its volume increased by 33.9%, to 121.4 billion rubles. Analysts attribute the growth, among other things, to an increase in the penetration of cloud services, the transition of “a significant share of users to Russian clouds from foreign ones,” the emergence of new participants in the market and “the focus of large providers on the cloud services sector.”

Most of the cloud services market (83%) came from IaaS (IT infrastructure located in the cloud). iKS-Consulting analysts also emphasize that the government customer segment (B2G) plays a big role in the Russian market. They attribute this to the development of public services based on clouds and the active transfer of government authorities to a single platform. “The introduction of cloud services in the B2G segment will contribute to the growing popularity of clouds in the corporate segment and should maintain the growth rate of the cloud market at a high level,” the study says.

“As the market grows and becomes saturated, the pace of expansion drops slightly. The influence of the transition to domestic clouds is gradually fading away,” clarifies Stanislav Mirin, leading consultant of iKS-Consulting. “In the market development model for 2024, we include a growth of 29% in money. The basic factor remains – business digitalization. The active implementation of technologies related to artificial intelligence is being added.”

New sanctions may affect the situation: on February 23, the US Treasury included the largest Russian data processing center (DPC) providers in the SDN-list. Kommersant’s interlocutors noted that many data centers purchased Western server equipment and software licenses, but now problems will arise with this. Among the data center providers on the list are 3data, Oxygen, Miran, Rostelecom-DPC and other companies also offering cloud services.

Rostelecom refused to comment on the impact of sanctions on the cloud business. The first vice president of the company, Sergei Anokhin, at a conference call on February 27 on financial results for 2023, said that Rostelecom this year will actively invest in the construction of new data centers in Moscow and cities with a population of over a million. The Kommersant company clarified that they will expand the capacity of data centers in Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and St. Petersburg and have begun construction in Nizhny Novgorod. The amount of investment and the volume of capacity in Rostelecom were not disclosed. 3data (more than 6 thousand racks) told Kommersant that the sanctions will not affect the company’s plans and it will launch at least two data centers this year. Yandex Cloud, ANO KS Data Center, Oxygen, MTS Cloud did not respond to requests.

“Despite the fact that import substitution and the abandonment of a number of foreign IT solutions in 2022 gave a noticeable impetus to the domestic infrastructure market, the transition of business to cloud solutions is rather a fundamental trend,” notes the director of products at Selectel (3.5 thousand). stands) Konstantin Ansimov.

“There is active import substitution of equipment and a transition from Western to Eastern brands,” adds Stanislav Mirin. He clarifies that the cost of equipment will continue to rise under sanctions due to supply problems. The CEO of the hosting provider RUVDS Nikita Tsaplin agrees with this. In his opinion, one of the trends in 2024 will be the rise in price of cloud services, “it will be provoked not only by restrictions, but also by market consolidation caused by the introduction of a registry of hosting providers.”

Alexey Zhabin