Removing roaming – Newspaper Kommersant No. 33 (7478) dated 22.02.2023

The State Duma recently suggested that the government return to discussing the issue of “banning work from abroad for IT specialists” and presented a draft resolution with a list of positions to which the ban could apply (primarily developers of state information systems). But it seems that the business has already taken the situation into its own hands and has begun to independently identify the “left” employees.

At the Ural forum “Cybersecurity in Finance”, which was held from February 15 to 17 in Yekaterinburg, Alexander Egorkin, First Vice President of Gazprombank, said that after the announcement of partial mobilization in the fall of 2022, the bank began to track employees who moved abroad by service numbers: “ This was necessary in order to decide what to do with them – for example, cut off access to all systems at once.

Alexander Yegorkin complained that the operators did not immediately provide the necessary information, the process, according to him, took a week and a half. As a result, the operators provided a table with subscriber data, which “turned out to be not very convenient”: after all, it had to be “imposed on the internal personnel base”. During this past time, Yegorkin added, almost all employees got rid of office phones: “In the future, such things need to be done much faster, and it’s better to fix the procedure at the legislative level.”

The largest telecom operators, as expected, did not comment on such a statement, although it is not the first of its kind. In May last year, Maksut Shadayev, the head of the Ministry of Digital Development, said that the ministry also requested data from the Big Four operators in order to understand how many IT specialists left or had already returned to Russia. Then the analysis showed that about 80% of the owners of SIM cards of Russian operators who left Russia after the start of the military operation in Ukraine returned.

Now the Ministry of Digital Transformation has clarified that “they do not analyze the number of SIM-card specialists who left, assessing migration according to the data provided by the IT companies themselves.” Large companies, however, have already found a more effective way to ensure security: simply restrict any access to their systems from abroad via IP. Interlocutors in IT and the banking sector, in particular, told me about this.

However, Gazprombank’s proposal to legislate the procedure for tracking employees by numbers as a whole may open up new opportunities for operators: nothing will prevent them from charging a fee for collecting and processing such information. Demand for it will certainly be found among both large and small companies.