Russia needs technological independence from IT giants – Kommersant

Technological sovereignty in the field of IT is one of the development priorities in the coming years. This was stated by the head of the digital business department, senior vice president of VTB Nikita Chugunov at a joint session the Territory of Innovations project and Kommersant Publishing House as part of SPIEF-2023. According to him, despite the success in the field of import substitution, it is not yet possible to completely eliminate dependence on IT giants.

“There remains one big issue – technological independence. The share of digital business in banks is over 50%, and when we try to reach the client, and mobile applications, push notifications, tokenized payments are removed from him, this is exactly what stops digital transformation. If we can completely translate mobile development into abandoning dependence on Apple and Google, then this will be a big plus. This is exactly what we are working on now: complete independence and cloud-based updating, when we deliver banking content to the client’s device, regardless of the release policies, rules and checks of companies,” said Mr. Chugunov.

At the same time, according to him, it is currently impossible to completely get rid of addiction, since gadgets still have hardware functions: a camera for reading a QR code, a notebook for transfers by phone number, NFC for tokenized payments. “Hardware features are the minimum that should be left, everything else should go into cloud, hybrid web technologies. We must get away from vulnerabilities,” Mr. Chugunov summed up.

The expert also added that in terms of import substitution, VTB is now at the final point. “With import substitution, everything turned out well. I was pleasantly surprised that there was something to replace databases, ERP systems, and processing. We have almost everything imported,” he said.

As Kommersant previously wrote, the Ministry of Industry and Trade, together with Russian manufacturers of computer equipment, is considering the possibility of restricting parallel imports to Russia of products from more than 20 foreign brands, including Acer, IBM, Dell and others. Russian vendors believe that it is necessary to generally ban the supply of equipment whose analogues are produced in the country. But participants in the IT market and data center operators say that the current quantity and quality of domestic equipment will not be enough to meet demand, and in case of restrictions, it will only increase in price.

More details – in the material “Kommersant” “Forbidden Server is Sweet”.