Microsoft is closing its programs – Kommersant FM

Russian corporate Microsoft users will no longer have their programs updated in a day. The American corporation will stop renewing licenses for its software on September 30; customers received notification of this back in August. The developer cited the inability to “accept payments to Russian accounts” as the reason for this decision. As specified, companies that paid for software on the official website of the IT giant with bank cards will not be able to update subscriptions. Software purchased through partners will presumably not be affected by the changes.

Access to various Microsoft products will probably disappear gradually, noted Denis Kuskov, CEO of the analytical agency TelecomDaily:

“Until recently, even after announcing its departure from Russia, the company still continued to serve clients here. It was simply unclear during what period they would be turned off. Direct contract extensions are now ending and will no longer be issued.

Office applications have licenses for one year, and now companies that have some version of Western bank cards will find an opportunity to pay for this. But the majority still cannot do this, so they either switch to domestic solutions or look for ways to extend the service life of the Microsoft license.

We are talking about software products, primarily office applications, in particular Microsoft Teams, a video conferencing program, and cloud services that made it possible to work from different points in the same company.

It’s likely that access to them will disappear in October. But there are many applications, they work differently. It happens that there is a certain period of time after which, if the subscription is not renewed, the main functions are disabled.”

In the summer of 2022, Microsoft promised to reduce its business in Russia until “there is nothing left” of it. After this, the corporation limited access to downloads of some products.

But last spring, for example, it extended the licenses of companies that were not subject to sanctions. As Kommersant wroteabout 1 thousand legal entities received such an offer, primarily local representative offices of international corporations.

How sensitive will the termination of software maintenance be for a business? Kommersant FM discussed this issue with Igor Bederov, head of the information and analytical research department at T.Hunter:

“Most computer equipment was sold with ready-made operating systems, as well as office suites, or they were installed through affiliate programs.

Many state corporations and large private businesses are slowly migrating towards open source solutions, alternative Russian operating systems and office suites, or free OpenOffice, LibreOffice and KDE.

As for pirated versions, Russian legislation does not suffer from liberality in this area. If you start using unlicensed software in the corporate segment, there is a basis for holding you accountable.

If we talk about objects of critical information structure and other protected objects, then the main regulator is the Federal Service for Technical and Export Control, on whose website it is written what, how and where to use.

There is another corporate segment. A priori, the company makes a profit, so theoretically it will be watched and, most likely, this Russian segment will slowly migrate towards an alternative.

In terms of business packages, MyOffice completely replaces Microsoft programs. As for operating systems, there are at least three options with which, in principle, most users can be satisfied.”

According to the presidential decree of March 2022, the public sector, banks, telecom operators, the fuel and energy complex and some other structures will not be able to use foreign software in two years.

At the same time, as a January study by SearchInform showed, only 3% of these enterprises have completely switched to domestic programs. Another about a quarter then said they were in the process of transitioning.

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Elizaveta Skobtsova