Business is in the Russian clouds
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After the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, Russian entrepreneurs paid for the services of domestic cloud providers 87% more often than a year earlier, Tochka Bank calculated based on an analysis of payments to Yandex Cloud and SberCloud. The need to replace foreign cloud services was expressed by 30% of companies surveyed by the bank. At the same time, peaks in monthly demand in March and November 2022 were followed by a decline of almost a quarter. Market participants note that some players still depend on the decisions of foreign providers who left the country and are looking for ways to pay for them.
The number of transactions to cloud service providers Yandex Cloud and SberCloud (the current name is Cloud) has increased by 87.3% over the year since the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine compared to March 2021-February 2022, Kommersant was told at Tochka Bank (serves legal entities and individual entrepreneurs) based on the results of the analysis of payments of 12 thousand customers. The growth in the number of transactions in relation to Russian cloud providers turned out to be the most significant among all domestic digital services (including email distribution services, SEO platforms and domain registrars), follows from the bank’s data.
In 2022, due to the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, the most popular foreign cloud services Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure announced the suspension of activities in the Russian Federation. Russian companies began to switch to domestic clouds, which led to an increase in their prices by 60–80% (see Kommersant dated March 23, 2022). In July 2022, the EU Council announced that the approved sixth package of sanctions also included cloud services, but later the mention of such sanctions disappeared from the press release and was not included in official acts.
Foreign cloud storage had to be replaced by 30.1% of companies, Tochka says, based on a survey conducted with Roistat. Among the difficulties that specialists encountered when looking for alternatives, the lack of necessary functions, problems of transferring and integrating data are mentioned. As a result, the largest share of respondents (41.1%) began to use both Russian and foreign digital services, only 22.2% of respondents switched completely to domestic analogues.
The market volume (the amount of money received from payment) of Russian digital services as a whole from March 2022 to February 2023 grew by 57.3% year-on-year. The fastest growth was observed in March – by 126.5%. Tochka analyst Yulia Krigan says that against the backdrop of a sharp departure from the Russian Federation of foreign services, entrepreneurs began to urgently look for domestic counterparts, but after increased interest in domestic services in March-July 2022, a decline followed. In her opinion, Russian products might simply not be suitable for some companies, but “someone found a way to return to the old and beloved services.”
Yandex Cloud Commercial Director Alexander Chernikov confirms the “irregularity” of demand throughout the year: “In the first half of 2022, we saw a sharp acceleration in the growth in the number of new customers, in the second half it returned to the level of the original forecasts.” Cloud and VK Cloud did not answer “Kommersant”. Kommersant’s interlocutor in the data center market explains the demand for Russian cloud services in the spring of 2022 by the fact that Russian companies urgently tried to find alternatives to Western solutions, but “the situation stabilized in the summer.” He believes that growth will continue in 2023, but “will not be as explosive.”
The surge in demand was also associated with the inability of customers from Russia to quickly bring or purchase equipment, “everything that was in warehouses was bought up almost immediately, many rented resources for the future,” said Pavel Kulakov, CEO of Oxygen. According to him, Russian clients in 2021 spent from $400-500 million per month on foreign clouds, 80% of these funds were transferred to Russian providers. However, there are companies that cannot refuse foreign services and are looking for alternative payment methods, “this may be due to the use of complex industry solutions or exclusive services, for example, Microsoft Teams in the Azure cloud,” he said.
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